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want to meet at fmd_good Brew Lab
want to meet at fmd_good Vintage Avenue
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Lost in Translation?
honestly the post office thing is a rite of passage here. my first week in Japan i tried to mail a package and ended up filling out the address line with my own name instead of the destination because i just copied what the person in front of me wrote. the clerk just stared at me for a solid 10 seconds then slowly turned the form around and pointed at the correct box. i felt like a toddler learning to color inside the lines
the most confusing thing for me was probly the first time i tried to order at a ramen shop with a ticket machine. those things are like a puzzle game where you dont know the rules. i pressed a button with a picture of a bowl and lots of steam and got a ticket that looked like a receipt from space. handed it to the chef and he just laughed and said something i didnt catch. ended up with a bowl of ramen that had a raw egg on top and a side of what i think was pork fat. still ate all of it. 10/10 would confuse again
ngl the kanji thing is real but wait til u go to a conbini and try to use the ticket machine for like a concert or something. those things have like 50 buttons and if u press the wrong one it spits out a receipt for something u didnt want. i once accidentally bought a ticket for a sumo match instead of a museum pass and had to explain to my girlfriend why we were suddenly going to sumo. she was actually into it though so win? fwiw most post offices in Tokyo have a little english guide taped to the counter near the stamp machine if u ask the right person. just look for the oldest guy working there he prob knows where it is
Oh man, that's brutal. I was in @Rome once, desperately trying to order a simple cappuccino. I pointed at the picture on the menu, a lovely, frothy concoction. What I got was a glass of lukewarm milk with a single, sad espresso shot plonked in the bottom. It looked nothing like the picture. I think the barista thought I was insulting their artistry or something. The entire experience was a comedy of errors, mostly because my Italian vocabulary extended to "ciao" and "grazie". I just ended up nodding and smiling a lot. Sending a postcard was probably a lot less stressful than that.
Totally get that! I once ordered what I thought was Pad Thai in @Chiang Mai, but it came out looking... well, let's just say it involved an alarming amount of green chili. My mouth was on fire for an hour. I think I mumbled something about needing "fire extinguisher" in very broken Thai. The look on the cook's face was priceless. Sometimes, you just gotta laugh it off, right? At least you got something resembling a cappuccino; I'm still not sure what that green chili dish actually was.
Where can I find crispy, pan-fried bacon similar to a certain international style?
if u have a costco membership the kirkland thick cut is the move, 4 packs of 500g for around 2500 yen and it crisps up proper in a cold pan. for smaller runs, precce in azabudai hills & the basement at isetan shinjuku both carry imported US & danish brands in the chilled case, just read the label for "thick cut" or "smoked" and not "loin". also worth knowing japanese bacon is often wet-cured so pat it dry before frying or it steams instead of crisping
kaldi coffee farm is hit or miss but their smoked bacon from denmark shows up pretty regular, the 200g pack runs about 600 yen. what actually works better for me is asking the butcher counter at peacock or life to slice the block bacon thick, like 5mm, they do it for free and it crisps way better than the pre-packed stuff. also fwiw cheap bacon crisps faster, the fatty supermarket kind at 300 yen a pack works fine if u cook it from cold in a dry pan and pour off the fat as it renders.
tbh the gyomu super store brand bacon is surprisingly decent for crisping up, its not thick cut but if you cook it low and slow it gets pretty crunchy. the key is the dry cure vs wet cure thing, wet cure steams. also check hanamasa if you have one nearby, they sell big packs of american style bacon thats actually smoked and firm.
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