Shopping

We all went shopping at the weekend. We loaded Akira onto the mamma chari, (that's an old sit up and beg style shopping bike with a basket on the front and a little plastic seat on the handlebars for Akira), and I pedaled him while Reiko used her mountain bike. We cycled down to the park at the riverside and then along the bicycle path to the toll bridge, (free for bikes) and across the river. A short cycle through some farm areas and we arrived at Carrefour, a massive French supermarket/shopping mall. They are having a special feature on Thai food at the moment, so Reiko wanted to buy fresh herbs for making a green curry or something.

Unlike most Japanese supermarkets, Carrefour has wide aisles and plenty of space for browsing the produce. They also have an in-house bakery where we can load Akira up with free samples of bread, which he happily stuffs in his wee face. We bought some take out food for lunch and some drinks and went along to the food hall to find a table. It wasn't too busy and it's fairly smoke free so a good spot for us. There are so many noisy families eating there that one more squealing brat isn't even noticed, so that's a plus too.

After lunch, we headed home and Akira flaked out from all that fun and excitement,(sarcasm). I decided to cycle into Kawagoe to get a few things, especially a new CD-MD-Tape deck for school. I headed off along the cycle path again, but in the opposite direction and was in Kawagoe twenty minutes later, ( a journey which once took me an hour by car!). I parked my bike in a long row of bikes next to Atre department store and walked past Gaia Pachinko parlour to the station to buy a Japan Times, one of the English language newspapers here. I then went to the Virgin record shop on the top floor of Marui Department store for a free copy of Metropolis, the weekly classified ads magazine that is available in the Kanto area.

Reiko had asked me to get a few things at the hyaku-en shop, that's a shop where everything costs fifty pence. I walked down 'Kurea moru', (Clear Mall, so named as it is clear of traffic, I think). One thing that you can't fail to notice in Japan is the Pachinko parlour. There are hundreds of them. They form a blot on the landscape and Kawagoe must be the Pachinko capital of Japan. Pachinko is a wierd gambling game that sort of resembles a vertical form of pinball, but without any of the fun or excitement. The idea is to feed steel ball bearings in at the top of your machine and try and guide them through the maze to the bottom, thereby getting points which earn you extra ball bearings! Whoo hoo! fantastic and about as entertaining as watching paint dry. There are millions of Pachinko fanatics in Japan, you can see them queuing up outside to get on their favourite machine before the doors open in the morning, mostly pathetic wretches. To be able to enjoy pachinko playing, you have to chain smoke, this renders the atmosphere in a pachinko parlor completely toxic to normal people, and you must be almost completely deaf as the noise in these dens of iniquity is like a formula one Pit stop bay in the middle of a race. I had to run the guantlet of the pachinko parlours all the way down the street. The automatic doors, (almost all Japanese shops have them), will open as you go past and your senses are assailed by clouds of noxious ciggie smoke and the din of thousands of steel balls battering around stupid machines, not nice!

Hyaku-en shops on the other hand are great places. If you are only staying here for a year or so, you can pretty much outfit your rabbit hutch in these places, Maybe not with furniture, but dishes, cutlery, bath things, etc. All sorts of nick-nacks that you didn't realise you couldn't live without are available there. I managed to find most of the things Reiko wanted, ground sesame seeds, toilet cleaner, plastic disposable gloves for handling raw meat, a wind-up submarine for Akira's bath and a postcard album for Reiko's postcard collection. I then headed to Rogers, a large discount retailer to buy my favourite type of bread and get some staionery supplies for school.

I think that this post is long enough already and if anyone has managed to read this far and stay awake, they deserve a break, so I'll continue it another day. Cheers for now.