Japan likes vending machines. As I have already noted before they’re everywhere in Japan and very useful during the hot sticky summer months when you could easily be sweating at 0.000025m3·s−1 (i.e. a lot) and the cold winter when you have a long wait for a train and want a hot drink. It may seem that your average vending machine does not and cannot be much improved, they are after all pretty simple and efficient to use; insert money, press button, drink. If you think that then you are wrong. Japan, well known for its technology products has decided that actually the humble vending machine is not modern or snazzy enough for the 21st century and has therefore built new ones with massive touchscreens on them.
Finally, vending machines are released from the shackles of mere buttons and can reach their full potential. Pictures of the products are displayed on the screen and all you have to do is swipe you train card (plastic cash which you could use on the older machines too) or mobile phone, across the scanner and touch the screen, none of this messing around with buttons, oh no. Since there is now a screen available to display images the designers obviously had to come up with a cute mascot that could be shown on the screen when no one is buying anything. Yes, of course the machines can detect when you approach to buy something (there is a little camera above the screen). They will even recommend you a drink based its guess of your age and gender. It recommended me milk tea the other day so I guess it can also racially profile and knew that I was British!
Over Christmas I went looking for some presents and ended up in a store called Loft or at least the store next to it that just joined onto the side but didn’t have a name I could read. They had a great Christmas display in there of a complete model gingerbread village, with a working electric miniature railway.
The sign in the first picture says “Please don’t touch. Please don’t eat” just to remind you not to start munching away at the display. Of course I had to buy one of the kits for baking your own gingerbread house, but because I don’t like cooking, I’ve left that up to my mum, I’m sure she’ll figure out the Japanese instructions.
Keeping with the food theme, here is some tasty frog I ate in a random Japanese drinking bar or izakaya. Not quite believing if it was actually frog and not just something else which happened to be the same word for frog me and my friend had to ask the waiter if it was the frog that goes pyon pyon pyon (the Japanese onomatopoeia for jump, I guess the English would be boing boing boing). It was, and it was also very tasty being a mixture between a fish and a meat flavour. The meat was also very soft rather than chewy as I’d thought. I recommend it if you have the chance and can now add it to my list of weird things eaten.
Oh. Also, a pig in a wig that was walking along the pavement. I don’t know either.
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