Continuing with the food theme, there are heated options available at the register, including hot dogs, chicken drumsticks, oddly simmering bread items that are submerged in some sort of broth that frightens me, and everyone’s favorite, corn dogs. Depressingly, these are called “American dogs”.
Aside from food, there are innumerable toys, magazines, trinkets, baubles and doo-dads for sale, none of which anyone would ever in a million years need but which I continuously find myself compelled to purchase. So it is that I own an entirely useless but thoroughly entertaining action figure of Kirby, a Nintendo character, wearing what I can only guess is a Navajo chief’s headdress. I don’t know either.
Interestingly, these stores are entirely devoid of Aspirin, Aleve, Tylenol, or anything that may similarly be desired at a 7-11 or equivalent back home. The Japanese have a fairly rigid set of restrictions on drugs, tame and strong alike, and as such things like these are hard if not impossible to get a hold of, even sometimes with a prescription. There are all sorts of snake oil type cures and elixirs, each and every one of which is guaranteed to do virtually nothing for you.
Anyway, this has become almost as complicated and dense as the konbinis themselves, but I will leave you with one parting remark that hopefully encapsulates why I so dearly love these places. Recently, I had a strong hankering for some ice cream. I trudged diligently up the road to the nearest Mini Stop, and ordered a cone of the ‘beruji choco’ (Belgian chocolate) soft-serve that they had been so persistently advertising recently. The clerk hurriedly dashed off to the back room to perfectly dispense the soft-serve onto a delightfully scalloped waffle cone, and then came back and proudly presented me with a bag. I regarded both the clerk and her offer quizzically, as where I come from (“’Merrica”), we aren’t often served an ice cream cone in a bag. I peered into the thing and saw that not only was my cone in fact in there, but that it had been carefully placed into an equally carefully designed cardboard ice cream cone holding device. It didn’t end there though: I inspected the package a bit closer and discovered to my surprise and delight that there were in fact TWO cones: the traditional, “foundation” cone upon and into which the soft-serve had been dispensed, and a novel, exciting “adorable hat” cone which had been placed on top of the vertical point of the soft serve so as to protect and preserve the conical shape of the ice cream itself. As my head spun, I reflected to myself how insanely ridiculous and yet simultaneously fantastic this was. I love this place
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