Now I've Seen It All (While Shopping at Homes)

But I didn't have my camera with me. So you'll have to settle for reading about it.

While playing at the Livin park today with our friends Mel and Jocelyn, we escaped the cold inside the nearby store, Homes. Miranda's blue lips reminded us that we should pick up some handwarmers for our separate upcoming trips to Nagano to see the famous Japanese Snow Monkey Park.

Well, shopping in a Japanese store is unique in two key ways. The first being that since you can't read anything (or clearly ask anyone for help), you can only hope there are pictures on the product for which you are searching--which helps both in identifying the product AND, most importantly, in figuring out how to use the product.

After three years of this pictorial shopping, you actually begin to think much like a merchandiser--wading through aisles, homing in on like products, surveying your way from one similar product to the next even more similar product. It's like a good old game of "hot and cold." Only no one's telling you you're getting "hot" or "cold"; you have to figure it out yourself. As politically incorrect as it is, I've come to think of this as the Braille method of shopping in a foreign country.

I must be getting really good at this, since I noticed our first clue for finding the handwarmers-- the plastic display of snow monkeys swimning in a Japanese hot spring, just as you'd see at the Snow Monkey Park! (This is the first photo I would've captured for you. But instead you can check out this website for a real live webcam of the monkeys in the hot springs!) So, in record time, shopping experts that we are now, we found the Japanese handwarmers. Around the corner on the same aisle as the snow monkey display. Ahhhh so! And then we couldn't stop ourselves; around the next corner we found the soft, cute animal pouches for attaching the handwarmers to your children's coats. (If a snow monkey, Hello Kitty, or Anpanman pouch existed, I would've bought one for myself.)

The second unique thing I've observed about shopping in a Japanese store was that people bring their pets with them. This isn't PetSmart. This is a regular store. And today the second thing I wanted to capture on my camera that wasn't with me was a woman with her "frou frou" dog dangling from her core in a baby sling! In all honesty, I probably couldn't have gotten a good shot of that, since she came around a corner quickly, which wouldn't have allowed me time for the camera draw. In fact, she had passed me so quickly that she didn't see my unconcealed smile at the sight of her. But just thinking about it makes me smile again. So, who needs a camera? Maybe you'll smile, too, just at the blog of it.