By Chris
November 14, 2019 • 3 min read
November 11-18, 2019
Now that we've seen many of the touristy sites in Tokyo and Kyoto that we wanted to see, and now that we've onsen-ed our hearts out in Hakone and Kurokawa, we are back in Kyoto and it feels like a different city. This is because we chose an Airbnb this time, and it is 18 minutes by walking/train to the more centralized part of Kyoto. We are in the burbs (kinda).
Our current Airbnb is a house and has a kitchen, living room, and two bedrooms. Having space feels great, since the last time we were in Kyoto, one of our hotel rooms barely fit just the bed. This house also has heated floors, which I am loving. The owners also kindly have bikes for the guest to use, so I tried one out this afternoon and had so much fun. I had to google how to lower the seat though. What did people do before the internet?!?
I was really excited to go grocery shopping for the first time. I researched what recipes I wanted to make this week and everything. Then we got to the store, called "Life" and it was hard. I had really underestimated the time it would take to find normal things like butter. I had to consult google translate, realize butter is "buh-ta" and ask "buh-ta wa doko desuka?" Where is the butter? It was not next to the milk like I expected. In fact, eggs were next to neither milk nor butter!
We wanted to buy some salmon sashimi and make sushi, along with inari and instant miso. However, figuring out which cuts of salmon were sushi-grade was challenging. Even buying rice was difficult since we couldn't read much. We accidentally bought special rice that we think is more like brown rice. I tried cooking it and it came out half hard, half mushy. We also didn't have any measuring cups, and the pot had a hole in it. I covered the hole with tin foil, tried again, and it was only marginally better. Finally, I broke down and walked to the local conbini (convenience store) and bought instant rice for WAY too much money. I am now struggling with serious confidence issues about making rice.
This is what our "dunch" (lunch/dinner) turned out like. It was around 2 pm at this point.
One thing we noticed at the grocery store is that produce like veggies and fruits are significantly more expensive and smaller sized than in the US. On the other hand, salmon is way cheaper and cut into these nice slices for your, rather than the slabs in US stores. They have TONS of great premade food like tempura, sushi, sashimi, donburi bowls, bento, and onigiri just waiting to be bought, and for pretty reasonable prices like 5$ a meal. We've had some good ones, but tonight realized there's still value in-home cooking since some of the premade meals are also rather salty and dry (our cooked premade salmon tonight was disappointing). We can also make more veggies and healthier sides at home.
I'm not giving up on rice just yet. I plan to bike to the grocery store again (18 minutes walking) and grab some classic white rice tomorrow. I'll also pick up some raw salmon and try tin foil packet cooking it on the stovetop. Many of these Japanese Airbnb do not have ovens (almost all) so stovetop cooking is a must. I also plan to try making omurice this week.
In general, we budgeted 60$/day to cover both of our daily meals worldwide and realize this will sometimes be too little or too much. While doing touristy things, since food tourism is a part of that, it was either just right or sometimes not enough. However, now that we are living more normally and cooking, I think the 110$ we spent on groceries will likely last us most of the week (bringing food budget down to less than 30$ per day for both our meals (still not quite 110$ / 7 since sometimes we get ramen at Ichiran or something, and will need to buy a few other things). This is great since I under-budgeted our transportation for Japan.
Overall, it's been pretty fun trying out a local routine.
January 25th to February 20th After our brief stay in Singapore, we more or less spent the next month (from January 25th to February 20th) on various Thai islands. It was a blast and a really unique experience. Looking back on it I'm probably struck the most by how different the experience was on each of the islands. We also had some interesting experiences getting to and from the different…