Random Picture 57

My husband and I were taking a walk around Ogikubo and happened across what seems to be the viral spread of Don Quixote shops. We walked around the mob forming around a huge box of cheap Chinese flashlights and past the 18-roll toilet paper (post-quake behavior) that people were eying nervously and headed back to the snacks area. It was there that I eyeballed this specimen, but didn't have the ovaries (that's what we say when one is female and lacks cajones, right?) to buy and sample. This is a bag of a salted snack treat called "ika meets maple". Ika is squid. Yes, there is many a day when I think that I'd like to buy a serving of squid and pour maple syrup on it. Even for the Japanese, this is pretty "out there" on the flavor front.

Random Picture 29

One of the local supermarkets in my area (Peacock) allows a revolving door of merchants to set up camp outside of their store to sell various items or foods. Sometimes housewares are on offer, at others, cakes or traditional foods like tofu. This past week, a man has been selling a huge variety of snacks for children. Most of them are small, individual-sized snacks, but there are some bigger items as well. This squid snack, which is designed to look like a 100,000,000 yen bill, is about 2 feet by 1 foot in size (61 cm by 30.5 cm). It's very flat, like a sheet of seafood paper, and it cost 480 yen ($5.70), but I wasn't going to spend that much for something for my weeks of weird considering that I'm not likely to enjoy it.

This is the sort of thing I have never seen in regular shops because it's just too big and bulky for a store to relegate shelf space to it, but I'd probably like it if I were a kid, and if I liked squid.

If you'd like to share your experiences with weird foods and enter a contest for a chance to win a silly prize, please read this post and make a comment.