MAME SHIBA~

ね、知ってる？ 「Ne, shitteru?」

I don't know what the time difference is between here and PST. I cheat. I have a clock on my dashboard that I click and it tells me the magical time.

A hippo's sweat is pink.

You should watch the mameshiba videos on youtube. I forget what they're up to - like 18 at least or something?

In Japanese, mame （豆）means bean. ...beyond that I don't actually know what it means. But these videos are basically "once a day facts" videos (kinda, since they're not really once a day) but they're really cute different beans with faces on them. Though really, by "beans" they mean "round vaguely shaped bean things" including chili beans, jelly beans, green peas... Yay for random trivia~!

You can buy keychains and stuff over here of them. Also kanji books and phrase books and bento boxes and what have you.

Surprisingly though, only one of my teachers has known about it when I've told them.

Oh, apparently the website says that they're bean-dog hybrids.

豆しば〜

This is what I do at 1 am when I don't want to go to bed. I think I might have abused my powers of the drink bar at Coco's and drank way too much coffee. That is to say, a cup of coffee.

Oh, I don't think I've mentioned drink bars. THey're kind of awesome. Moreso than American ones anyways. What do we even call them in English? Do we also call them drink bars? All I can think of right now is that at Sweet Tomato's/Souplantation (I actually forgot the name and had to google that just now) has pretty much the same thing, where you have to buy a drink (unless you want water) and then you get unlimited refills. For some reason, I never made that kind of connection to the ones back home (until literally right now). Perhaps it's because you only really see those kind of all-you-can-drink bars at family restaurants or Jolly Pasta or other chain places? Nomihodai all-you-can-drink alcoholic beverages are a different beast all together. They generally make you order your drinks for that though.

Drinks in Japan in Okayama anyways, unless you're at a family restaurant or fast food place or eating a set meal, are ridiculously expensive. Like today, at the place where I had lunch, a soda was 500 yen ($5+). I was like "HOLY CRACKERJACKS" and ordered a nice coffee instead.

The one at Coco's is called the *premium* drink bar. It has loose leaf tea with little tea pots and at least three different machines that dispense some form of tasty coffee/tea and another for soda and another for iced tea/coffee. I guess the loose leaf makes it premium? They have pu-er tea! And pineapple tea! And baked Apple tea~ <3