My readers have spoken, and I have listened! Darren requested food photos. Ask, and ye shall receive!

Eating in restaurants is for when you’ve got company. For solo, bachelorette-style eats, you want vending machines! When I travel alone, I make up little games for myself – little challenges to be met, little tasks to accomplish – to stay entertained and help push through the jet lag.

Today’s challenge was a culinary one: to make it through the entire day trying to eat only food that a) could be purchased at either a vending machine or street vendor, and b) had little or no English translations on the packaging. Basically, I was playing Russian roulette with breakfast, lunch and dinner. No clue what kind of tasty comestibles I was putting in my mouth at all.

Here is the list of vending machine beverages I drank today, and my impressions of them:

1. Georgia Hot (coffee): I wasn’t fully awake when I bought this, and having only experienced cold vending machines in Canada, I actually yelped when I picked it out of the dispensing tray and it was hot to the touch. My first real WTF?! moment in Japan. Sugary, but acceptable coffee. Recommended.
2. Calpis (lemonade): Bought this mid-morning, to wash the coffee taste after my mouth. Was hoping for a nice, tart, cool bottle of lemon drink. It was also hot. Hot lemonade?! Second WTF moment. Tasted surprisingly good, though. Recommended.
3. Minute Maid Morning Banana: The one thing the Japanese palate can cope with that mine rebels at is consistency. Why can’t they understand that giving food the viscosity of chunky slime is nasty? This beverage comes in a little pouch with a narrow capped spout, sort of like a Capri Sun. You can’t actually see what’s inside before you drink it. I put it to my lips, sucked, and nearly spat it out all over the sidewalk when I got banana-flavoured chunky goo on my tongue, thick like chewy curdled milk. Third WTF moment. Mega gross. Not recommended.
4. Boss Coffee Rainbow Mountain Blend: I thought Darren was hallucinating when he suggested I look out for the “coffee with the moustache guy on it”, because there were no machines selling such a can anywhere near Shinjuku or Shibuya. But once I reached Akihabara, there it was. Boss. Lots of it. The marketers would have us believe “Shintory Boss is the boss of them all since 1992”. I passed over the blue and yellow cans and tried the rainbow can, and I can say it seems to be the sugariest of them all. Darker roast and bolder flavour than the other coffee, though. Recommended.
5. Pocari Sweat: Although I have to give them snaps for their bold marketing campaign (who wouldn’t want to drink sweat?), this drink was quite bland. The closest thing to it would be watery Gatorade or flat Sprite. Meh. Not recommended.
6. Karada-Meguri-Cha (tea from Coca-Cola): this blend of 8 traditional chinese herbs and 4 natural tea leaves tastes like ass. Not recommended.

For “breakfast” (I’m going to use quotes around all of these meals, because my inner clock is so messed up that breakfast felt like dinner and vice versa) I had some rice gluten balls filled with red bean paste and possibly chestnut paste. One had sesame seeds on it, another appeared to have coffee beans or something in the skin, one was green, another pink. They all kind of tasted the same, actually.

For “second breakfast” I had more glutinous balls, smaller ones on skewers, covered in thick, gelatinous red bean paste. I also had a triangle of rice with some salmon inside and a cunningly overpackaged piece of seaweed to wrap it in.

For “lunch” I had two mystery foods, both unexpectedly involving hot dogs. One was a rolled-up pastry that looked like a sort of cheese blintz/crepe thing, but was more like a piggy-in-a-blanket, with a surprise hot dog tucked into the cheesy center. To get some veggies I bought what looked like little chains of mini-corn but are actually green corn husks tied together with string, wrapped around… something. I have not yet opened them to discover the mystery, but my scooby-sense tells me it will either be rice, red bean paste, fish, or some combination of the three. I followed it up with dessert in the form of strawberries in what looked like a chocolate shell, but on closer inspection proved to be yet more gelatinous red bean paste.

Now, Z warned me not to eat any fugu, on account of my sensation of impending doom as I prepared for this trip, but she was non-specific as to the consumption of crazy exploding bombs. So I ate one for “dinner”. See below for details of how they are made – inside my cooked bomb thing there was a whole quail egg, a one-inch long diagonal slice of hot dog (disturbingly finger-esque), and some pink stuff, all covered in a liberal coating of mayonnaise and green onions. I ate it 9 hours ago and haven’t regurgitated it yet, so I guess it was okay.