Guest Post - Denise Mouch

Who is Denise Mouch you might ask? Well she is an awesome person, she loves me a lot and she gave me half of her genes, she is my mother! When she and my dad went to visit my brother in Japan recently, I asked my mom to take some photos and to provide you all with some photos from their trip.

I'll let her explain to you more about Japan especially two essential to Japanese culture, vending machines, yes vending machines, no joke and department stores. Think Bloomingdale's level of department store with door greeters and elevator operators who wear white gloves and the bottom two floors are food items.
Take it away, Mother and thank you again for bringing a blog post back from Japan!

Here are two interesting items we saw when we walked into the basement of a Japanese department store. For those of you who don’t know, many major department stores have food to purchase in the basement.  Fresh food to be consumed the same day, or gift items to give.  Melons are thoughtful gifts to give and this beauty is familiar to many.  Hello Kitty, complete with a pink hair bow, is a very unique present indeed. Don’t you wonder how they started her outline?

The second gift that caught our eye was this very expensive box of cherries.    They look perfect, don’t they? They should as this box is one layer deep and costs more than $84.00 depending on the exchange rate.

Vending machines are ubiquitous in Japan.  Literally, in one block you can find ten of them. We saw cigarette, drink, battery, ice cream and snack machines and there is even one for bananas.  During the winter months the drink machines feature hot drinks.  There is nothing better than a hot coffee right at your fingertips when you are waiting for the train or subway!  When the weather turns warm, the machines dish out the cold drinks. The products vended here are pocari sweat, water, tea, cocoa, coffee and some energy drinks.  Some train passes can be used to buy food at convenience stores or, as is the case here, vending machines. I had a tangerine drink one day and used my train pass to purchase it.  Now that is convenience!  

Hope you all enjoyed my mom provided you some more information about Japan and items that are commonplace to the culture. Happy Thursday!