Grocery Shopping

We have a grocery store a convenient THREE MINUTE walk from our house! Needless to say, it's very easy to go every day if needed. There is also a Daiso upstairs and other shops inside as well. 

I mentioned recycling milk cartons and trays at the grocery store before. This is the area where you do it. 

You need to rinse and cut the cartons so they lay more flat. There are instructions on the lid of the bin. Here are my cartons:

Here people grocery shop more, so a hand basket is standard. However, you can put it in a cart. 

These are the carts. I once saw someone put two hand baskets in the cart, one on top and one in bottom, but that was just once. 

These watermelons must have been popular! The store had been open less than an hour. Also, those are ice packs to keep them cool! I love the attention to detail!

Most produce, but not all, is portioned out into a set number in a bag. It's a good thing they recycle film type plastic here!

Lots of seafood.

Let's talk about milk. My family is big on drinking milk! My oldest son is 6'4.5" (~195 cm) and loooooves milk. In the states I would buy 5 gallons of milk (1 gallon = 3.8 liters, so about 19 liters) at the beginning of the week, and sometimes even buy another gallon to get us through the weekend to Monday morning. Well, milk is only sold by the liter (even at Costco it was two liters of milk wrapped up together). So....we are buying 2 or 3 liters of milk at a time. It's a good thing the store is only a three minute walk away!

Salad looks a little different here. 

There is a good sized ready to eat/prepared food section. We were eating lunches from here for the first few days in our house. 

🎶Sandwiches are beautiful sandwiches are fine. I like sandwiches I eat them all the time. 🥪🎶

My Animal Crossing friends: fruit sandwiches DO exist. It is white bread with whipped cream and fruits in the middle. 

My kids like oniguri! (Rice balls)

There is even a selection of western style food. We haven't tried these corn dogs yet, but someone must be eating them. I've noticed them several times. 

Body wash section. There is even an American brand offered! 

The check out process:

OR, you can cheat and do self check out where there is an English button on the home screen and she sounds just like the ones in the States!

Side note, but related. This is my refrigerator. It has a built in egg holder! Also, look at the eggs! They have individual stickers with the date on it, so when you buy more, you can eat the older ones first. Brilliant! 

This is far from a comprehensive review of a Japanese grocery store, so let me know if there's a section of the grocery store you'd like to see more of!

Garbage and Recycling

It might sound bizarre to make a post about this, but IT'S.A.THING. There are many rules and collection happens all week. 

There are four types of garbage. Red is the easiest. It's burnable. This includes kitchen scraps, dirty plastics (like when buying food and eating on the go) and anything else that doesn't fit in the other categories. The hazardous category is collected in a separate bag on the same day. This garbage is collected twice a week (so nice)!

Green is nonburnable trash. It's things that can't be recycled, or are big. Things likes batteries, old small appliances, broken dishes, or in our case, my garment bag that was dragged along behind Papa P's truck. It's only collected once a month. We just missed putting out for the moth by a week. 

The most complicated category is recycling. It's divided five subcategories: glass, plastic bottles, other plastics (including film plastic that is commonly used to wrap new items in the store which I couldn't recycle in the US), metal cans (soda and canned goods), and paper. 

Me, trying to figure out today's recycling (Monday), which covers four types of recycling. 

I went to take the first bag of plastic bottles and realized it was more than just that today. I hadn't looked super closely at the paper--today is also paper and cans (we don't have any glass bottles). I cheated by looking at how others had sorted it.

I went to the store to buy smaller bags. Our relocation contact had me buy 45 liter bags for recycling and burnable garbage, but they are way too big for our trash sorting cabinet and our amount of plastic bottles and cans. 

Bags for trash MUST be bought within the city you are using them in. The cost of the bags pays for the collection. 

The Nagoya bags have their owl mascot on them. 

This recycling day is done at the park. Other plastics such as wrappers are left in front of the house, once a week, on Wednesdays. For today's recycling,  there are signs thar have writing and pictures on them telling you where to sort each kind. I ran into one of my older neighbors here for yhe first time. I spoke with her in my broken, particle-less Japanese abd told her we lived over there, came from America, and that my husband works for Toyota. I am sure I sounded worse than a three year old. I probably sounded like a cave woman, but I tried. She seemed pleased to meet me. 

There is one more way to recycle that I forgot! Paper milk cartons and styrofoam meat and food trays are recycled at the grocery store! Milk comes in liter cartons and you rinse and cut open the carton. 

Last week when I went on a walk it was burnable garbage day. I took a few pictures because I thought it was interesting. I saw the garbage truck and several guys jumping out to collect the garbage from several houses at a time. I think this was an apartment building or business. They have the cages to keep the birds from getting in the garbage. Not sure why there were blue bags on the right. 

Residents in houses or apartments sometimes had nets, also to keep the birds out. Apparently a lot are yellow (but not all) because supposedly the birds can't see them. Our contact called them crows, but the ones I saw were so huge, I think they were ravens. Ravens are smart!

I think I have a basic understanding of the garbage sorting here, although, I think there is always more to learn!