I was watching the NBC nightly news podcast this afternoon when they mentioned the price of food going up. So I decided to take a look at prices online from one of the stores I used to shop at in Vegas, and compare to what I spend here in Tokyo. Though the current exchange rate is somewhere around 108 yen to the dollar, I’ll use 100 yen to a dollar for simplicity’s sake.
Item: Vegas Price, Tokyo Price
- Eggs: $4.49 (12), $1.89 (10) or $0.37/egg, $0.19/egg
- Milk: $3.19 (.5 gal), $1.60 (1 litre) or $6.38/gal, $6.06/gal
- Bread: $2.00 (20 slices), $0.99 (8 slices) or $0.10/slice, $0.12/slice
- Yellow Bell Peppers: $2.00 ea, $0.75 ea
And it continues on in this manner with meats and veggies etc. For instance, I buy packages of 2 large chicken breasts for around $3.15. I’m shocked. When I came to Japan, I felt like everything was so expensive. Have prices gone up that much in the States in the last 6 months? Or was my initial perception of prices in Japan just misguided?
Went to the Ota city ward office yesterday to file for my alien registration card and national health insurance and then walked around a bit and checked out the shops near Kamata station. Today I registered for classes and we missed our stop on the way back and decided to get off at Shibuya since it was only a few stops away. Walked around a little bit and stopped at Softbank to look at cell phones. Couldn’t get mine yet as their English speaking guy wasn’t there and none of us could speak Japanese well enough to cover all the technical terms.
So many people talk about culture shock in Japan, but I really haven’t experienced any so far. Maybe it’s living in Tokyo; I assume going to more rural parts of Japan would be quite different. The only real problem is the language barrier. I’ve been picking up new things just about every day, but it’s not like I’m entirely immersed in the language, so it may be a slow process.
The SA kids arrived today. The first batch I met seemed OK, but overall they don’t seem to have the interest in Japan that us JA students do. Unfortunately this is exactly what I was afraid of. Without a certain level of knowledge and respect for the culture, they can very easily make the rest of us look bad throughout the neighborhood. And if this kid who (literally) just plopped down in the room next to mine continues to be as annoying as he is right now I’m going to have to kill him in his sleep.
I’ve posted a few more
