Today let me introduce a drugstore called "Kawachi". We used to go to a pharmacy to get medicines and stuff, but this kind of drugstore popped up everywhere in the last decade or so, and we can buy almost any kinds of thing here.
As far as I know, Kawachi is the biggest drugstore in terms of size among others, and as they sell a variety of goods, it is one of the places people visit to buy things. I think there are some other drugstores in my city, but their competition is really fierce like Ramen shops, so they distribute ads very often to show us they sell things more cheaply than the others.
If we like to have a good Ramen, we would go to a Ramen shop like the one I introduced in this post, but not all of us have enough time to dine out and sometimes our budgets are limited. So we buy these instant noodles for lunch or as a snack. As you can see there are so many kinds of instant Ramens, and I don't know which is the best.
These are also instant noodles, but you have to put these noodles in boiled water for minutes. It takes more time than the instant noodles in the second pic, but in my book these taste a bit better.
When you hear the word "sake" or Japanese liquor, you may think of a bottled sake, but there are package type sakes. If you have some bottled sakes, you might find it messy to do away with the bottles, but these packages can be disposed of easily. And the prices are a bit lower. You can buy a 2 litters of sake bottle for about 11 dollars.
These are called CalorieMate. Some people are so busy that they don't have time to visit a restaurant during the lunch break, so they have this cookie-type meal for lunch. A package that costs 158 yen or 1.7 us dollars has four pieces of cookie, and if you have them all, the total calorie you get is about 400kcal.
I think the Japanese people are much thinner than foreign people, but most of us really care about our weight. Some skip a meal to lose some weight, but as you know that is not good for your health. So people have this "diet biscuits" instead of a regular meal.
After working or studying hard, you would feel exhausted. And these tiny bottled drinks would let you regain your energy. The yellow ones you're seeing in the center and left are named as they are, "Regain", and it's one of the most popular energy drink brands in Japan.
It's in the winter, and you might easily catch a cold. But these pocket warmers are popular also in Japan. I play tennis in the winter, so I stick one on my back when it's freezing cold.
According to a survey, almost a half of the Japanese people have hay fever. So this store sells special masks that keep you from inhaling pollens and small bottles that let you spray some mist in your nose. The latter is effective at least for a few hours.
As I told you before, I'm a huge fan of canned coffees, but I often have this instant coffee at home, which melts easily in hot water. There are more than a dozen brands, but in Japan ones by "Nestle" are the most popular.
