Illiteracy and its Challenges

Every day I realize the difficulties of living in a country where I don't know the language. I have a pocket dictionary, which helps me a little. However, even with that, I find little things like grocery shopping to be very challenging.

Our first day in Taiwa (2 weeks ago now, crazy!), Nathan and I went grocery shopping. In that excursion, I wandered around the store looking for things I might want to buy. Many items were completely novel and intimidating. However, I managed to find some of the basics: a bag of rice, eggs, etc. I bought some veggies that looked like they could be related to lettuce or spinach. And I bought some random cooking oil. I wandered the store trying to find something resembling oil. Finally, I found a bottle, but I had to ask Nathan to make sure.

Since I couldn't find the spices in the store on that first excursion, my cooking was too bland to even bother eating. (It didn't help that I couldn't read the buttons on my rice-cooker and it took me multiple attempts to make a decent pot of rice.) So a few days later, I went to another grocery store on a quest for spices. Salt and pepper would have been a good place to start, along with curry powder. After wandering up and down the store, I managed to find the spices. I foudn curry powder first. In fact I found several different containers of curry powder. One of them was labelled "Indian Curry Powder" and to emphasize how Indian it was, it had a picture of....and American Indian with a headdress. I settled on some curry powder without the ridiculously incorrect logo. I found the pepper pretty easily as well, although I had to guess that it was pepper. However, I could not find any salt.

On my third attempt at grocery shopping I finally found some containers of white powder that could be salt. Since I couldn't read them, I guessed which one to buy. Of course, this guessing made me unsure about what I had bought, so when I came home, I decided to taste in order to make sure the spice I bought was in fact salt. However, when I put a little bit on my tongue, I dicovered that I had accidentally bought MSG!

It was not until my fourth excursion to the grocery store that I FINALLY found salt...labeled in English, no less.

Grocery shopping is becoming somewhat easier. The milk has pictures of cows on it. I bought some meat the other day, guessing to make sure it was chicken. But this has been just one example of what I am sure will be the many challenges that Japan will bring.