i asked about more stuff from my exchange sempai who's in japan right now. turns out, she's gluten intolerant so has a lot of the same problems my wife and i have with buying food. she said most soba is made from half-wheat, half-other flour, but since they're all making the noodles from scratch anyway you can just go into the shop and ask them to specially make noodles for you that are 100% non-wheat and it's no problem!!

other than that, food definitely IS cheaper than in sweden on every topic except vegetables. brown rice in japan is 99% of the time ecological and pesticide-free — white rice isn't; a kilo of that brown rice is way cheaper than the same here, or than a kilo of the flour we already use every day here. i also found multiple, entire restaurants in sendai catering to people who only want to eat wholegrain ecological stuff. sendai has 10x the amount of people uppsala (sweden's 4th biggest "city") has, and i've been in the "countryside" here for so long i forgot that if you live in an actual, real city you have a ton of diversity in what you can buy.

anyway, yesterday i pulled out 3 japanese novels, took photos of random pages and used an app to highlight the kanji meanings i don't know. this isn't the WORDS i don't know, just the chinese letters i don't know. i wrote the wrong date (it's 2017, not 16) but here's where my level is at right now:







i plan to do the same thing right before i leave to japan, then i'll be able to have real "proof" of how much my japanese improved during the exchange.