going to my first day of school in a couple hours; long story short:

- japan is AWESOME buuut not having fluent japanese and not knowing "local knowledge" is really a huge problem. not even train station personell (the kind that sell student bus passes to foreigners) can speak english AND all the exchange students who came here last semester etc have magically forgotten what it's like to have NO CLUE what's going on. these guys also come from sweden and have only been here for 6 months and yet they don't understand that if the train lady asks if a card from x to y is alright, we have no clue where those places even ARE. an old man got kinda irritated at me if i asked when he was from sendai when we weren't precisely in sendai (we were like... 20min by bus away from it?) and i'm like, dude... i can't even remember the name of where i'm at right now since i just learned it half an hour ago, sendai is the closest i can get...

- TONS of food we can eat. most stuff that has sugar also has a "stevia" or "grape sugar" equivalent without normal sugar, including grocery store sushi and rice balls (almost none of the rice balls have real sugar in them). we can apparently eat stevia without getting sick. soy sauce without wheat and sugar is "rare" but you can still find it in the grocery store, same cost etc as all the other soy sauce (it has big DOESN'T USE WHEAT written on the bottle). carbonated water is rare but we still found it at one grocery store; the easiest thing to find and drink is tea (plain green tea is even in vending machines otherwise selling only coffee/soda). haven't yet found any food vending machines. we found 100% buckwheat soba and 100% mochi rice flour mochi (no sugar or anything else added) after a bit of searching in the grocery store. japanese meat doesn't seem to ever have anything added to it (beef seems to be plain beef without sugar etc, unlike in europe and america) except for when they've given it a sauce or breading.

so far we've liked everything we've eaten except for: umeboshi (pickled plums), bonito (dried mini fish you put in soup), some fruit/vegetable smoothies. haven't eaten at any restaurants yet.


some people (strangers, cashiers etc) are REALLY happen to see me, sometimes people stare in surprize (ex. when i was eating nattou in public). it's a lot easier here, ex. you don't ever feel rushed at checkout because the cashiers themselves are so slow and unrushed. they aren't chatty, just slow. if anyone's unfriendly it's not actually because you're a foreigner, they were already unfriendly from the beginning (i know because i watch how they handle the other customers before us too).

well that's all for now!