Tokyo - Timing is all
04.04.2024
18 °C
A few weeks ago we joined thousands of tourists in Hualien, Taiwan, to visit the famous Taroko Gorge. Now, the places we visited lie in ruins with many people dead and trapped by an earthquake. While many buildings in the small seaside city were badly damaged, the roads, bridges and tunnels perched precariously alongside the steep sided gorge have collapsed entirely. It took many years to construct this roadway and it will be years before any tourists have this view again… 
Dozens of buses usually ferry thousands of people a day into the gorge, and many hundreds would have died had the quake struck later in the day. Such disasters constantly remind us that timing is all. Timing always plays a role in our travel plans as we attempt to avoid inclement weather, dangerous places, and tumultuous crowds. However, we are sometimes beaten by both Mother Nature and the throngs of sightseers…
Spring came late to Japan this year, but now it has arrived the multitudes are flocking to see the blossoms alongside the moat of the Imperial Palace in Tokyo... 
This is the first spring that Japan has been fully open to visitors since Covid, and the crowds are so thick that dozens of security guards with megaphones desperately try to keep people moving…
We still have many blossoms to see in the next few days, so, as promised, a look at Japanese food. There are restaurants catering to every taste, (including McDonalds’s), but we generally stick to the traditional Japanese places where we can eat well for twenty or thirty dollars. This is okonomiyaki, a form of pancake stuffed with bacon, octopus and cabbage, being cooked in front of us…
At the top end of Japanese dining are places like Sezanne where the dinner menu starts at about five-hundred dollars a head, while it’s perfectly possible to get a meal for under ten bucks if you’re not particularly fussy. However, we have been very surprised at the price of fruit and vegetables in the supermarkets. While some major department stores cater to the wealthy, here are a few examples from a regular supermarket in Kamakura…
A hundred Japanese yen is almost exactly one Canadian dollar, so a single banana costs $2.38, two mangoes cost $37.80, a very small punnet of cherries costs $25, a single grapefruit costs $5.50, one Fuji apple costs $7.50, and this plastic wrapped small pomegranate costs $17.00...
Perfect melons are particularly prized in Japan and this cantaloupe was priced at $110.00…
Vegetables are equally expensive with tomatoes selling for two to three dollars each, and small cauliflowers going for ten to twelve dollars. Markets are usually the cheapest place to buy local produce, but at the fish market in the coastal city of Kanazawa crabs were selling for two hundred dollars each – Ouch!
Even the local oranges and satsumas are double or triple what we pay in Canada, so we will be raiding the produce department at our local supermarket as soon as we get home next week. In the meantime – a slice of strawberry flan for $13.00 seems like a snip… 
Very thankful you missed the disaster at Tarako Gorge, sad the loss of lives. As many people as blossoms from the sound of it. The Japanese pancakes look delicious. Have a safe journey home.
by Sue Fitzwilson