Chiba road trip part III: New discoveries

Despite living in Japan for almost four years, I still get those days when I stumble onto something new and it’s just a thrill. Finding novelty in life is so important to keep you feeling fresh and vital.

And sometimes, it’s the small things that make me giggle…

After our enormous dinner, we settled down to play Game of Life in Japanese, jinseigemu. I understand that it’s an American board game that was invented in 1860 and it has been played all over the world. But I’ve never heard of it till this Chiba holiday.

The Japanese was quite simple and we only needed our Japanese friend to translate the instructions occasionally. Basically it’s a board game very similar to Monopoly…

You have a “character” that moves from square to square (mine was a yellow car; everyone had a different coloured car); have paper money and a banker; you get money when you land on certain squares but you have to pay the banker money on others; you also gain friends or children along the way which are little sticks you put in your car.

This is the tiny dial that came with the game and you spin it to see how many spaces you have to travel.

I can’t really remember the goal of the game — the winner is the one who finishes the first or the one who ends up with the most moolah?

Anyway, it was a fabulous post-dinner game for lots of laughs over a tipple or two…

The other discovery I made was a curious substance that could solidify used oil.

It comes in little satchets of powder made mainly from sesame seeds.

You empty one satchet into your pot of oil…

And the next morning, it becomes a gel-like solid!

My friend scooped this stuff out with a spatula and dumped it into the trash.

I asked him why he bothered doing this, in fact, why not pour the oil down the sink? He was appalled at this suggestion. Oops. He said it was to prevent Japan’s lakes and seas from being polluted and it also stops water pipes from being clogged.

This is something I encounter with non-Singaporean friends on occasion — there are little or no environmental habits in the little Red Dot so I am oblivious to those in Japan and need to be taught or told the right way. Things may be changing slowly in Singapore, but when I was living there, all I knew was that we threw all kinds of garbage together, incinerated everything, and had few recycling bins in the city.

So, I learned two new things about Japan in one short trip. Cool.

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