May 28th 2016 | Summer Taste.🍬🍬
Your Japanese candies are almost there! This email explains what was in the box, so it could be a bit of a spoiler.
The items in the box are: panda, dragon and watermelon candies.
Pitaya Hard Candy
Delicious and refreshing pitaya fruit is a real treat. You might know this fruit by its more ferocious name though: dragon fruit. Oddly a enough, pitaya is actually a cactus fruit. Go figure! These pitaya hard candies are bursting with a sweet juicy flavor. They're great when you need to soothe a soar throat as well!
Kabaya Watermelon Gummies
Japan has unreal hot summers. I mean I'm from Arkansas (U.S.), where the soles of your shoes melt on the road in the summer, but Japan heat is no joke. To stay cool, the go-to treat for Japanese people is delicious and refreshing watermelon. Kabaya has essentially packaged mini-watermelons into candy form. They are very close to the real thing. Sweet, juicy, refreshing and fun to eat!
Kabaya Chocolate Panda Biscuits
I'm not from the UK, so it pains me to call a cookie a "biscuit," but that's the way the panda cookie crumbles I suppose. These mini-pandas are as tasty as they are cute. They're actually quite well-known in Japan, ranging in flavors from strawberry to matcha. These chocolate flavored ones are their flagship cookie. They're sweet, crunchy and cute. Why can't all cookies be like that?
Last time I showed you guys a small part of my trip to Joypolis in Odaiba. It's a large in-door theme park from Sega, specializing in VR-style games. For example, you can sit in a life sized car with a large screen in front of you, which moves and rumbles as you drive. Another game has you sitting inside a large rocket that spins along with the game.
The yearly vacation time in Japan is very limited. It's not untypical to spend your holiday in a tightly scheduled tour that tries to fit in as many countries and sights as possible.
I feel that a holiday should be about relaxation, about forgetting your busy schedule for a while.
I wanted to share the relaxed style of holiday with my Japanese in-laws, so we rented a cabin in Finland and spent the holiday there. Our time was spent fishing, swimming, having long conversations over coffee and enjoying the nightless night midsummer festivities.
I think it took a while for them to grasp the idea behind this style of holiday, but soon they were into it and I would call the experiment a success.