Frogleg > wrote:
+ Dipping fruit in a salt/sugar/chile combo sounds like
+ something I would like. And I'll bet American fruit, salt, sugar, and
+ chiles are pretty much the same.

I don't know about Thai, but I call apples from Japan "ringo" and mandarin
oranges from Japan "mikan" because they're not quite like the apples
(even the Fuji apples) or mandarin oranges here. (I got a whole tub of
a dozen or so really beautiful and delicious mikan for only 250 yen.
All the fruits they sold looked so picture perfect there. Even the
fruits in the tiny shops on little, crooked, out-of-the-way streets made
the stuff at large supermarkets here look frighteningly diseased.)

The takoyaki I've been able to find here is an over-salty, gluey,
heavy, rubbery, and pretty much inedible imitation of what I got there.
The tempura and katsu are lighter and crispier there, and the curry is
a bit more subtle and complex. I suppose all that can be chalked up to
having poor restaurants here, but we're talking about sit-down restaurants
here charging rather high prices for having worse food than cheap food
courts and street vendors there. I was told that I should expect to pay
insanely high prices for food there, but their idea of cheap fast food is
so much better and more varied than our idea of sit-down restaurant food
that I ended up spending only a small fraction on food that I expected
to spend. Their portions also weren't as small as I was led to expect.