Summer tastes and autumn views

Since I've skipped all August, I decided I'll do one more post related to summer. More specifically about summer tastes. I might have said before that in Japan many specific flavours of certain products get sold only in specific seasons. Mint chocolate is a summer flavor, while pumpkin and chestnut flavoured sweets are sold in autumn only. Fruit flavoured KitKat is also for the summer, while in spring you can get sakura-cherry (blossom) flavoured ones. That's the system here- I like it and hate it at the same time. It's fun because you get to try new flavours all the time. It sucks, because you can't eat your favourite stuff throughout the year. Plus, if that flavour doesn1t sell well, you won't see it next year. I think seasonality is a food issue everywhere, but in case of sweets the variety is more or less constant, with a new flavours being added from time to time. No flavours disappear  temporarily. Once they disappear it is most likely forever, unfortunately.

So, this summer the two most unusual things we have tried were tomato chocolate and salty watermelon pepsi. The pepsi was forgettable. You can't really taste the salt, which is frequently added to summer drinks here to prevent hyperthermia. Last year we tried the "azuki" bean flavoured pepsi, that was horrible. Compared to that, this one just tasted  like carbonated watermelon juice.

Btw, it has nothing to do with coke. Absolutely nothing.

The other outrageous food we tried was tomato chocolate. It doesn't even sound right. I'm sorry to say this, but in terms of western clothing and food, Japanese people tend to have no sense at all when it comes to mixing flavours or materials/colours/styles. Older generation women who grew up adoring Audrey Hepburn, and were longing for Chanel do have a very good sense of style, these days might be a bit too formal, but very elegant and feminin nevertheless. Most young Japanese adults, however, are following Lady Gaga like futuristic and surreal fashion trends that make them look like homeless beggars, or recently escaped patients of the psychiatric ward, rather than fashionable people. 

Anyway, let's get back to the tomato chocolate, this odd creation of some aspiring employee of a chocolate factory. It's supposed to be healthy...hmmm...if I want to eat healthy, I would rather eat fresh tomatoes I guess... So I don't really get the concept, and let's not even talk about the taste. It's like eating tomato, except the texture is the same as chocolate. The taste doesn't even remind me of chocolate-it's basically hard tomato cream that melts in your mouth...and I don't even like tomatoes. 

No wonder, that after one bite, it all ended up in the trashcan. neither of us could eat it, so we had no other choice but to acknowledge the defeat, loss of about a 100 yen, and get rid of it forever. I mean, Jesus, who would even think of mixing chocolate with tomato?? What's next? Spinach chocolate? Brokkoli pudding with whipped cream? I wonder if the people who created this chocolate have actually tasted it before releasing the product for mass consumption.

My mouth started to taste bad just by bringing up this memory, so let's change the subject. Autumn. Autumn has came, and it brought about some nice changes in the weather. Humidity is no longer making us sweat all day, and the temprature fall a few degrees, so you can feel the coolness of dawn and night. It feels fresh, and it brought a little bit of melancholy that sets in every year, gets worse in winter, just to make spring feel even fresher and happier for us. But I like this melancholy, although I'm officially a summer girl.

The autumn equinox was not long ago. The Japanese celebrate both Autumn and Sring Equinox due to Buddhism. It is called 彼岸 (higan) in Japanese, and the flower that blooms around this time is called 彼岸花　(higanbana). I've never seen this flower before, so I had to look it up on the internet for an English name. It's called hurricane lilies or cluster amaryllis, also known as Lycoris. It's beautiful. For about a week or two, I've seen them blooming on the way to my school. 

This fella frequently walks/flies me from the station to the school and back :) In spring and autumn :)