At home with Chie
A few days ago, I spent over seven hundred yen at 7-11, which was cause for them letting me draw a ticket from a bucket in case I won something.
I was lucky, and did! A can of Sapporo Mugi and Hop. Which is a bit of a booby prize for beer drinkers—it’s happoshu, which is a beer-like drink that you can get in Japan which cleverly skirts rules about what officially constitutes “beer”.
Well, I finally had a good reason to crack the can today—it was LUDICROUSLY hot, and I needed something that was (a) cold and (b) not actually necessarily good. The free happoshu fit the bill perfectly!
I let Chie have a taste, although she didn’t really see any reason to. But you never know, it might actually turn out to be good (there’s a novelty happoshu from Osaka, for instance, called “Hemp High”, a stoner brew that uses hemp in place of malt, and is actually very drinkable).
It wasn’t very good though. The odds were against it right from the get-go. She said, “Yup! That’s definitely happoshu. It’s actually kind of a nostalgic flavour.”
I said, “A reminder of the days when you had no money?”
She said, “That’s about the shape of it, yup.”
“Your university days?”
“Half a year ago, more like.”
Well…I guess she’s doing well for herself, at any rate.