2 posts tagged “shopping”

Where do you do your online shopping?

I love to shop - and online is no exception (though I find it more exciting to go out with my mom to shop!). Most of the time you can get better deals online than you can in stores, with the exception of places such as Best Buy and Wal-Mart. I think 99% of my online shopping is done at Amazon, and not to sound like a commercial, but they are pretty much the best place hands down to order books, music or movies. Heck you can get great prices on stuff other than that now too. What I love about Amazon is that they pretty much have EVERYTHING, and if they don't have it, then one of the people in the Amazon Marketplace does, and I've always had fast service buying from Marketplace stores too. It's really nice to be able to get everything I want from one website.

Amazon also has fantastic customer service. In the event that I've had problems with an item, I would email them and they'd have a replacement on my doorstep within 24 hours as well as a postage paid envelope to send back the item I wasn't happy with. If that's not great service then I don't know what is. :P

Oh, and anything that I can't find on Amazon, I'm guaranteed to find while surfing eBay. ;)

Bento_sakura_j23

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The other day while mindlessly perusing LiveJournal communities I stumbled upon this little comm and could not stop looking at photographs of beautiful and delicious bento lunch photos for the rest of the day. Through that community I found this Bento Boxes Flickr Group and by the end of the day I had a new goal to join this fascinating tribute to the wonderous culture of these beautiful little Japanese lunch boxes.

Like many other fans of Japanese culture I first became familiar with the Obento (お弁当) or Japanese Lunch Box through anime. I always thought the lunch boxes the school girls had were absolutely adorable, and the more school girl anime series I saw, the more I wished I knew what it was like to have one of these cute little lunches. I have been to Japan and to Japanese restaurants, but believe it or not, I have somehow never had the staples of a common Obento.

Bento box lunches really put the American brown bag lunch to shame. While we typically have a PBJ and some prewrapped process chips of some sort, Japanese lunchboxes usually contain fresh cooked fish, rice, meats, pickles and other healthy goods. The foods they put in the bento boxes are often the type that will stay good throughout the day and taste great eaten hot or cold. The most popular of course is the Onigiri (お握り) or Rice Ball that simply a tightly packed clump of white sticky rice that contains the filling of your choice. Onigiri are relatively easy and fun to make. You can decorate them or mold them into cute shapes and also get creative with your fillings! Unfortunately I have only  made them once and at the time we had no clean pots so I made my sticky rice in a frying pan. It ended up being undercooked and so my onigiri were not so good. ;_;  But I plan to make them again sometime.

Bento_sakura_j24

There are two things that make bento irresistable to me. One, they are beautiful! Part of making a good bento is making it pretty. There are many accessories you can purchase to add flair and color to your meals and also lots of molds for making your eggs and onigiri and other goodies into all kinds of cute shapes. The boxes themselves are also quite lovely. The second thing that is so appealing about bento is that they make you want to eat healthy! You are less likely to pack a factory sealed bag of Doritos in your lunch and more likely to cut up some colorful fruits or veggies to snack on instead. Just because the more colorful and fresh your obento is, the more you're going to enjoy it!

All this being said, I really want to try my hand at bento-ing! I spent a long time surfing eBay and J-List for boxes, and eventually decided this really lovely little pink one with a Sakura (Cherry Blossom) print. I can't wait for it to come in the mail so I can start making my own cute little lunches. :3