Wednesday, April 26, 2006

food labels...

Having lived abroad in various countries (living = in a country for longer than a month at a time, and no room service) over the last few years, one of the things I have come to appreciate MOST everywhere I visit are the food labels.

When I was in Sweden (my first living experience abroad), I had a flat, and I had a kitchen.. and I wanted to cook..that culinary side of me. but the problem is the cooking instructions on the side of the box are in a different language..temperatures, amounts - those are in arabic numerals, so I could fake it to some degree...but until I learned very basic swedish, it was a challenge.

that challenge continued through my stint in Germany - luckily, Oz was pretty easy(a version of English) - and if there was a question to an amount, I just added a pint of beer.

But Japan?? No..that is WAY different...forget numbers...they are in Kanji..The japanese are adament about calorie counts, so I can usually find that out fairly easily..but as far as ingredients? uh no...my nightly food is a rice cake, or rice ball..on my ride Saturday, I got a rice ball stuffed with a fried egg and.....ketchup..blech! Tonight, (well at 4:30am), I picked up what looked to be my normal rice ball...until I bit into it and found that it was a rice ball surrounding god awful fish paste...the label looked the same to me...

So..enjoy your food labels today...its the little things about home that you take for granted when abroad.....we'll talk about the wine situation another time...

Ciao!

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