Cheese (._. ) (and other interesting foods)

I don't know if I've written about cheese in Japan (probably?) but today's adventure to the grocery store prompted an entry. I think I've written about the melty cheese before... but maybe not.

Right. Let me backtrack a little and start off by saying, I love cheese.

Japan - at first glance, anyways - does not love cheese.

Let me be more specific. I love hard cheeses and I also love really flavorful cheese; blue cheese, feta, pepperjack, goat cheese (oh god, goat cheese). Japanese people, I've found in general (and in the supermarket), prefer cheese with creamier and more subtle flavors than a giant mouthful of OHAI THERE BLUE CHEESE.

So I got really excited today when I saw something that was was labeled gouda and looked like black cracked pepper. So excited I bought it.

cottage cheese... kinda

the top is all smooth...
this does not bode well

Then, I saw a little tub that said, カッテージチーズ, or cottage cheese. I got even more excited. I haven't found cottage cheese since I came to Japan. So I bought that too.

It tastes... uh, interesting. This was after I mixed it up. But it's kinda like cottage cheese... without the liquidy stuff you usually find in the can with it. So it's kinda dry? Interesting tasting. It's not quite as strong or tangy as the cottage cheese I'm used to... and it's more crumbly. But it's not bad I guess? I mean, I'm still eating it...

Actually, a couple bites in, as you chew, it starts to taste more like cottage cheese, albeit slightly creamy cream cheese.

Apple juice shots!

My other grocery store find (and subsequent impulse buy) were apple juice shots made by the same people who make that probiotic yakult drink. Shots of Aomori (the Japanese equivalent of Washington, as far as apples go) apple juice. So I figured, WHY NOT. I bought a pack; it had six of these little things. I guess the name of the brand is "chichiyasu" and on the bottom in Japanese, it reads "APPLE AOMORI"

Hooray Japanese!

Oh yeah. On the topic of weird foods... or well, not weird, but interesting foods, I recently went to Korea (maybe I'll get to that soon, since I don't have classes right now, so in theory I can work on writing about them...).

The food there is fantastic. Needless to say, I came back with a suitcase full of shin ramen (Best. Ramen. Ever.) and Korean nori, which is cut into more bitesized pieces of salted (and sometimes flavored) dried seaweed.

Another thing I brought back though, was this:

CORN!

This is one of the things a lot of other teachers bought: corn tea. The aftertaste in your mouth is literally like you just took a giant bite of sweet corn. It's a really... peculiar flavor, to say the least. Tasty though, which is why I came back with a giant box of it. 

Augh, I can't stop eating the cottage cheese! It just tastes so... weird at first but then as you chew (and that feels kinda strange too) you forget that you were initially freaked out by the creamy hardness of the cream cheese.