The colorful wolf

Yesterday I went with Wendy and Youngki to Shuzenji, an onsen place in Izu. It was a very enjoyable sightseeing trip. We visited some temples and weird theme park that had a British/Canadian village o_0. I am not going to talk about this at all :D Maybe I'll post pics later. First, I'm off to rant a little about Japan!

Right after the second world war the Netherlands were liberated by the coming of Canadian and US soldiers, who brought with them chocolate and cigarettes. Old Dutch people still remember this and always talk about how good the chocolate and cigarettes tasted that the soldiers brought with them. At least until they become senile. After today I am creating a situation in my mind where some country invades Japan, after which the Dutch liberate them, and introduce proper cheese to the Japanse people. Damn.

The Japanese love to wrap. And wrap again. And again. If you buy candy, the cashier puts the box of candy in a plastic bag for you. Even if you don't want it. Then, when you open the cardboard box, you will find the candy inside is wrapped again in a large piece of plastic. When you open this piece of plastic, you will find that the individual pieces of candy are again wrapped in tiny plastic cases. WTF!? And it's not only candy, they do it with everything. Even cheese. I have proof:

The picture above is a collection of weird cheeses I found in a mysterious supermarket hidden behind some big warehouses. As you can see it is wrapped thoroughly. Each piece of cheese is tiny! Inside there was the best cheese I've eaten since August: Goude with pieces of Italian saucage inside. Delicious. But there were also some monstrosities inside which I fear to describe here. Cream cheese chocolate. Cream fruit and rum. Actually, the cream fruit and rum was reasonable, but it is NOT CHEESE!!!. Yuck.

Today I was feeling a bit bored, and instead of doing something useful I decided to try to make a ham-cheese baguette, just like the ones my mother used to make at home. I strolled around Atsugi looking for anything that could come remotely close to the Dutch ingredients we used to use, but I failed miserably. I ended up with a baguette that was too big, disgusting synthetic plastic cheese and tasteless ham. I give thanks to Kamil who left me his oven when he left Japan. This is the first time I've used it :D Here's how it looked after baking it in the oven.

It may be hard to see on this photo, but the cheese refuses to melt properly because of some disgusting synthetic layer surrounding the cheese, which kind of looks like plastic. Damn you Japan! Get some proper cheese, dammit! The cheese stuck to my throat and I nearly died.

So ends my cheese experiments. Bottom line: the only way to get good cheese in Japan is to go to nice restaurants or specialty import food stores.

Bonus: have you ever seen an American dog in a microwave? Here's one:

Japanese call this 'thing' an American dog. It's basically a hot dog's sausage wrapped in batter. Also, Japanese sausages are smaller, as this Japanese hot dog proves:

That's all. I love Japan, but some things I guess they will never learn...