Behold, the distant present!

One of the cool things about living in Japan is how much earlier all the games come out here. Decades earlier. So get ready to suffer in your jocks: I’ve got Mario Kart!

What’s that? You already have Mario Kart? It’s out everywhere around the world already? Well… okay then, smart guy, is your “Mario Kaato” box in Japanese?

So, I believe that puts me 318 cachet points up for the all-important win. And just to pile on a few more points, rather than a steering wheel, the Mario Kart accessory is interestingly called a “doraibingu handoru” (driving handle) in Japanese.

At any rate, I’d been hanging out for this version of Mario Kart for ages, trying to recapture my misspent youth with the original Super Nintendo version. Unfortunately, my nostalgia gland omitted to remind me how freaking frustrating Mario Kart can be at times. Still, it’s great to justify playing games as Japanese study, even if the only words I really need to know are “last lap”, “you lost”, and a healthy sailor’s vocabulary.

I am the eater of your childhood legends

Just outside of my train station, a doner kebab van sets up camp at sunset each night, luring me in with its delicious Turkish fast food crack cocaine.  Really, although doner kebabs are not so popular in Japan, these are as good as any I’ve tried anywhere.

The various guys running the stall (a small van, actually) always have interesting stories.  Always foreigners, so far I’ve counted an Iranian, two Russians and an Indian at various times.  I had a good chat last night to my Indian kebab-making friend about the IPL.  He won’t watch because he’s convinced that cricket is ruined forever by bookmakers and match-fixing.  Then we talked about how much we hated / envied world-famous sports stars for having oodles of cash while cashing their blank moral cheques.  Now, there’s something we can all agree on all around the world.

At any rate, my favourite kebab van recently got a great new advertising sign out the front:

The amusing bit is on the third line.  In Japan, bread is called pan (an imported word from Dutch or Portuguese trading days, as far as I’ve heard).  At this store, they serve the kebabs in a pita bread.  Put it together and you’ll find that you’re in fact eating…. pita pan.

I usually like to follow up with a healthy Lost Boys salad with low-fat dressing.  Delicious.

I got it over the counter, honest

I got a bit of a head cold recently, so I stumbled to the local pharmacy and asked for something to fix it. A pharmacy is quite a daunting place when your language skills are a bit poor – I mean really, it’s a perfect opportunity for them to mess with you. The pharmacy lady handed me this:

Maybe it was the head cold or that I was preoccupied trying to decipher the usage instructions, but for some reason, it didn’t strike me until I saw it lying on my desk like this later:

That might explain why I felt so good after taking them.

So good.