Here’s a post I should have done AGES ago. I have a couple of friends, Paul and Kelly, who have moved out to Okinawa, a beautiful remote Japanese island.  As far as I was aware before Paul left his diet mainly consisted of cheese and onion pasties and baked beans (a very healthy balanced diet, I’m sure you’ll agree), and in an effort to soothe their homesickness I’d send them beans. A great substitute for friends and family I’m sure.

Anyway in a more adventurous moment inspired by the blogging by mail I was involved with earlier in the year we’d arranged to do a swap, I sent them some local delicacies (erm.. baked beans, salad cream, cream eggs and the like) and they sent me this amazing box of Japanese treats!

Now the first thing I have to say about when I opened the package is that I had absolutely no idea what anything was! Going on visual clues from the packaging they could have contained small toys, joke shop tricks, pop up snakes or firecrackers. It was great to try something with no idea of what you were about to put in your mouth would taste like. Must be like how small children feel every day.

The round pink thing seemed like some kind of squishy, sweet rice cake, pretty nice if a little odd. The various small packets turned out to be mostly small boiled sweets, usually cherry flavoured although I was convinced from the packet that the next one I ate might turn out to be an incredibly hot joke sweet.

My favourite item without doubt was the orange packet with black oblongs on (!?) which was some sort of crisp. I think it was small sheets of fried seaweed, with crunchy white stuff stuck to it, flavoured with wasabi. Hot hot hot!

There were four packs of what seemed to be beetroot crisps, and in possibly the biggest use of over packaging I’ve ever seen each pack only contained one crisp!

The pink box was ‘Meltykiss’, obviously a very romantic gift to give someone, sickly strawberry flavoured chocolate (or a mutant of).

Also in the package was a long kind of tea towel (probably actually a wall hanging?), noodle soup, a bowl to eat it out of, with chopsticks (fun) and this incredibly useful hat peg.

I wonder how I survived without it! Imagine, you’re walking along, a sudden gust of wind and before you know it your favourite bonnet has blown off your head and is tumbling over the side of a bridge heading for the river and out to sea, lost forever. I no longer have to live in fear of this tragic event. With my hat safetly pegged to my shirt collar I can stroll around town with a smile on my face safe in the knowledge that the hat and I shall never be parted. What a debt I owe to Paul and Kelly for equipping me with this item.

All in all it was a fantastic package. Loads of fun. Time for another round? Promise I’ll write up quicker next time.