When visiting a foreign country on a tourist trip, it is normal for people to visit the tourist spots and enjoy their history and beauty, right?
So, what are the places that are not tourist spots but are also surprisingly interesting to visit?

Have you noticed that when you go to a grocery store overseas, you can spend much more time there than you would think, just looking around and carefully examining the products? You might think, “I’ve never seen this kind of vegetable,” or “there isn’t a big variety of fish,” or “it doesn’t look so good, but they sell packs of sushi!” There is no end of surprises when you compare it to your own grocery store that you regularly visit and are accustomed to.

People who come to Italy and go to the grocery store may have noticed the size of the vegetables. The sales area has mounds of vegetables that are a full size larger than the ones in Japan, but, unlike Japanese grocery stores, the products are not uniform at all, coming in very different shapes, colors, and sizes. I have to wonder whether there are such things as quality control and quality standards here. And how cheap the fruit is! Especially the prices of melons explains why you commonly see uncured ham and melon on the dinner table in summertime here. That said, I try the huge fruit and vegetables, and, in fact, they are usually quite watery.

Japanese people tend to be clean freaks and Japan is a nation that is very cautious about hygiene, but I am sometimes surprised at the unusual way that Italians take an interest in hygiene. The fruit and vegetable cases in grocery stores have disposable plastic gloves next to the plastic bags for you to put your fruit and vegetables in.


This is focused on the hand that will be used to pick up and inspect the products. I personally feel that it is important to carefully wash fruit and vegetables you buy, so I do not fully agree that the disposable gloves are useful, but…


Meanwhile, at a certain grocery store that is frequented by specialists in the restaurant business but are open to the general public, there are jackets you can borrow before entering the sales space for dairy products. This is because the temperature of that space is set to only 2 degrees Celsius and it feels like you might freeze to death while looking at products in there. It is such a clever idea for a service to leave jackets there to borrow!


It is a very kind service, but the jackets also seem to be quite dirty… I hesitated to put it on when I looked closely at the stains on the collar, but the cold in the dairy product section is merciless, and the punch line is that I came out of the section shivering with cold and had to put on that questionable jacket. I can pretend I see no stains…

I think it is a good idea, but perhaps just a little more ingenuity is needed here.