And here we go again with yet another Fanta flavour – this time, Apple.

I’ll make this very short – it tastes like extremely sweet, carbonated apple juice. There’s nothing really more to it.

Cost: About 150Y

Availablility: Winter only, limited run.

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In Australia you’re taking your life into your own hands when you buy some premade sandwiches from a 7-11. Sure, some would be okay, depending on how much you pay for them but for the most part, you’re not just buying a sandwich, you’re buying a ticket in the lottery of projectile vomiting.

Japan is no different except that while the sandwich fillings look even worse than anything I’ve seen in Australia , I’ve never gotten sick from them, even with what I call the Egg Triple – 3 sandwiches, all with egg: egg and tuna, egg and ham, and egg and… egg. (Seriously. It’s mashed egg with sliced boiled egg.)

Normally most of the sandwiches are savoury – bits of ham or fried cutlets of some unknown meat – but occasionally you do come across a sweeter option, like these strawberry and cream sangers. They were very sweet and the cream wasn’t exactly fresh, but all things considered they were pretty good.

Cost:  280Y

Available: I’m not actually sure. I’ve seen them once or twice before so maybe all year round? Don’t quote me though.

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Another day, another Fanta flavour. There’s so many of these that I’m no longer shocked when I see a new bottle on the shelf with the familiar Fanta logo.

I was kinda disappointed with this – it’s supposed to have melon, cherry, apricot, peach and orange flavours in it… and it probably does, except I can’t tell them apart. It’s like when you were a kid at a party and you thought it’d be cool to mix a bit of all the softdrinks together. “They’re awesome on their own; together they must be spectacular!”

Erm, no. It tastes like sweeten stuff.

I drank this, but I’ve never even considered going back for another round. Thank god they’ll be off the shelves soon enough.

Cost: 150Y

Availability: Limited time, Winter only.

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The longer I stay (and eat) in Japan, the more convinced I am that the entire country wants to spend its days and nights drinking beer and eating whatever goes best with beer. Even main meal foods seem to be purpose-made to go well with beer.

This goes double for snack food, and Cratz are *fantastic* with beer. Made of almonds and a baked bread “tube”, salted and flavoured, they’re far too moreish. There’s only a few flavours at the moment: cracked pepper, bacon, and cheddar cheese.

The only downside is that the baked things tend to get a bit gluey and get stuck in your teeth but otherwise if you see these, get them.

Price: About 150Y a pouch.

Availability: Year round, god bless ‘em.

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Doritos are pretty popular in Japan, as well as chips in general – there doesn’t seem to be any mistake in thinking that a lot of food in this country is designed to go with beer. I’m pretty much happy to support this line of thought.

Most of the cornchip flavours are the usual cheese or ‘taco’, so when I saw the bright blue packet, I grabbed it up and ran for the cashier (as well as grabbing a bottle of Peach Fanta).

The chips weren’t bad – very coconuty with a bit of a curry aftertaste and burn. They weren’t quite as great as I was expecting with a kinda light, subtle flavour but they’re certainly not bad – they’d be pretty good with a stronger curry-flavoured dip or whatever.

Sadly, they’re a limited edition so they were gone as soon as they arrived.

Price: 140Y

Availability: Blink and they’re gone.

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One of the first things that I noticed coming into Cambodia from Japan was the price of the fruit.  I was no longer assaulted with the the “wow I could buy a PS3 for the price of that melon” sticker shock, because fruit prices here are more within the “I could eat for three days with less than a dollar” range.  Since I love fruit, I was incredibly happy about that.  And fruit here is everywhere.

Quite odd looking, the jackfruit slightly resembles what spiky alien genitalia would look like if it were to grow from a tree.  If left to its own devices, the jackfruit will grow to huge proportions, eventually growing larger than a basketball.

When cracked open, the jackfruit is no less alien than it is in its virgin form.  Waxy yellow bulbs are surrounded by stringy membranes that bear a striking kinetic resemblance to organic elastic. The smell isn’t exactly pleasing – it has a slight odor of garlic mixed with a sweet touch of decay.  If you were going just by the smell, you’d never be quite sure if a jackfruit is fresh when you’re about to bite into it.

If you didn’t take that first bite, though, you’d be missing out on one of the weirdest and tastiest fruits in the world.  Remember banana Laffy Taffy?  Or runts?  Jackfruit tastes exactly like those except with the consistency of nothing else I’ve ever eaten.  The texture runs somewhere between non-gooey taffy and older coconut meat, and leaves behind a sticky residue on your hands that is almost impossible to wash off.

Another notable feature of the jackfruit is its incredibly weird seeds.  By squeezing the bulbs, you can pop out the huge slightly-soft seeds that look like human kidneys.  I tried eating these too, but they were nowhere near as delicious as the meat of the fruit.  If you’re in Cambodia, make sure you pick up one of these!

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Before I moved to Japan, friends and family kept saying “oh wow, you’ll be so healthy and fit from all the wonderful fresh food there!” and so I expected most meals to be all about fresh fruit, vegetables and fish. It could be that way, but for the most part it’s not. There’s a lot of heavily preprocessed food, so unless you buy supermarket sushi, the easiest way to eat healthily here is to cook meals at home.

That’s all well and good, but even then not everyone goes for the raw vegies and fish, and end up frying something or microwaving something frozen and so they’re still not eating that well.

Enter Coca-cola Plus, which has no calories and a bunch of added fiber to help the country’s collective colons moving as they should be. There’s also other fibre-added drinks available (including one that features a cabbage on its label), but they’ll have their own posts.

It tastes pretty much like Diet Coke, which is what it is, but the mouth-feel texture is subtly different. It’s not like there’s lumps of Metamucil floating about in there, but there’s definitely something.

I felt kinda awkward picking this up off the shelf – it’s basically saying “I think I’m fat AND I’m all bunged up, but I’m so irresponsible about my body’s health that I’m going to put it in the hands of a caffinated drink.”

Mind you, in this country, that thinking probably makes perfect sense.

Cost: 140Y

Availability: It suddenly appeared out of nowhere, but it kinda looks like its here to stay, but who knows? It could be gone tomorrow.

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Japan’s pretty well known for its vending machines, so you’d think they’d have a gigantic range of drinks – and I guess they kinda do, but it’s not as massive as I thought it would. Y’see, I prefer drinking to eating, dunno why, always have – and I’m not alone in this. So generally if I’m in a store, I’ll grab almost anything to eat but I’ll take my time looking for something to drink that I really like or that I haven’t tried but looks interesting.

When I moved to Japan, I started going through all the local drinks one by one (not the bottled black coffee though – that stuff is just wretched), and the Kirin Lemon  (Or ‘Kirin Remon’ to translate the label accurately) was something that a teacher bought for me on a hot day, and without sounding too melodramatic, it was absolutely perfect.

Y’see, my biggest gripe with Western soft drinks is that they’re just too damn sweet. I don’t want my drink too be overly syrupy or sugary: I just want it to be refreshing, thirst quenching and some nice flavour in there to make it interesting… and the Kirin Lemon fits the bill nicely.

It’s carbonated and kinda like a cross between soda water and Lemonade (that’d be club soda and Sprite for our US’ian friends), so it’s got that lemon flavour, but it’s not sickly or overpowering – it’s just right. It also goes very nicely with vodka or gin.

I’ll drink this til the day I fly out of the country.

Cost: 120Y

Availability: Year round.

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Many people may not realise that Japan is actually not as reserved as you might think – alcohol is a massive social lubricant and pretty much everyone will have a glass of something if there’s an event on. Combined with legal public drinking 24 hours a day and beer vending machines scattered around the place, you could imagine just how often you’ll see someone with a can of something in their hand – even at 8am.

So, with alcohol comes hangovers – the price you pay for getting a bit battered – and while we in the Western world have our own black-magic cures of hair-of-the-dog, or aspirin crushed up into a peanut butter sandwich, in Japan, they’ve gone for the “health shot” option, in the shape of Ukon.

Costing roughly about 250Y, they’re mostly tumeric plus a few other elements to help keep things happy, internally. Tumeric is well known as a liver cleanser and the theory is that if your liver is being kept happy by the Ukon’s tumeric, then it’ll more easily deal with the alcohol you’ve been forcing down your mouth.

I’m not a doctor, I don’t know how true that is, but I do know from personal experience that these things work – and no, I didn’t drink a couple of litres of water as most people do when “testing” a hangover cure. I have two of these on a night out – one just before or with the first drink, and then I have another one at about the 6-8 drink mark or roughly half way through the night. The next day, I’m a bit dizzy but for the most part, I’m fine.

Some people have had limited success with the Ukon though and they really don’t taste very nice (although I kinda like them now), but they’re perfectly healthy and they certainly won’t hurt you.

And if you really want avoid a hangover, drink lots of water and have an aspirin-peanut-butter sandwich.

Cost: 250y.

Availability: Year round.

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While Japan certainly places first in hilarity and originality as far as food is concerned, no country has quite a diverse food culture as Cambodia. While the food isn’t spectacular (many people refer to Cambodian food as sub-par Thai food), you’ll often find things on your plate that you wouldn’t expect. Cambodians will eat literally anything that was once alive.

Why is this? Well, Cambodia is an oddity of sorts in the culinary world. Thirty-five years ago, some very bad dudes called the Khmer Rouge took over the country, emptying out the cities and forcing everyone into an agrarian way of life. While this would logically infer that the population would have a massive surplus of food, the Khmer Rouge realized that they could instead simply trade the nutritious goodness to China for weapons and ammunition. Unfortunately, bullets aren’t very high in protein, and this left very little food for your average Cambodian – approximately 500 calories per day.

Because of this, people were forced to improvise – they had to eat anything that they could find in order to supplement their meager diet. As you can probably imagine, this diet included many things that westerners would not consider food. After all those years, Cambodians never lost the taste for these “delicacies.”

For your entertainment I will break the loving trust that I’ve built up with my gastrointestinal tract over the years in order to eat everything that Cambodians claim is “food”. From the mundane and delicious (curries and banchau) to the insane (spiders and bird fetuses) to the suicidal (clams that have been sitting out way too long and the mysterious liquids you buy on the side of the road), if I see someone selling it, I’ll give it a try. If I suddenly stop posting, know that the food got the better of me.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to giving you bite-sized tastes of Cambodia (that may very well bite you back). Enjoy!

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