One-offs, pt. 4

You know those ridges on the side of freeways that hum really loudly when your car starts drifting onto the shoulder? The road to and from Mt. Fuji is covered in them, with different sections having a different width gap between the ridges, meaning the hum is a different pitch. When you’re driving to and from Fuji, you literally hear a song played to you by the road.

Most Japanese sake cups are wider and shallower than the ones we have in the states. This is because the original way of drinking sake was out of short cedar wood boxes if you were rich or seashells if you were poor.

The American hand gestures for ‘come here’ are considered rude in Japan; you use them to get animals or young children to come to you. If you’re talking to an adult, you use a gesture closer to our ‘shoo’ hand motion, except played in reverse.

Coffee shops don’t have actual milk for you to add to your coffee. Every single one has ‘coffee white’ packages, which are somewhere between heavy cream and creamer.

As a snack the other day, I got a little jelly snack with a candied cherry in the center. While the shopkeeper was very careful to make sure I understood the snack’s expiration date (even though it was a month away), she didn’t warn me of the much more imminent danger of the fact that the cherry still had its pit in it.

Oh you thought that was cheese on your spaghetti? NOPE. That’s yuba, the skin of protein that forms on top of tofu as it’s solidifying.

I’ve passed several “hair saloons” as I’ve been wandering (note the extra ‘o’). This just calls up amazing mental images of a cowboy walking into a saloon in curlers and sizing up its perfectly permed inhabitants.