Beer

The beer in Japan is pretty out of control. You can buy it on the street. You can buy it in giant 1000 mL cans. You can even buy it at all hours of the day, night, whatever. The varieties are endless, though they all taste pretty much the same to me. There is even an entire breed of beer that isn't actually beer. Beer is heavily taxed in Japan, so the breweries came up with this brilliant plan to evade the tax by making a beer-flavored alcoholic beverage with some other raw ingredient. I couldnt tell you the difference between the beer and the non-beer, but the non beer tends to run about 100 yen less per can. When you go out to clubs in Japan, they have a free re-entry policy, so rather than buying 700 yen drinks all night, you can leave, walk down the street to a conbini, and down a few tall boys for a few hundred yen. The beer pictured above was bought at a 7-eleven outside our hotel in Osaka. Oh yeah, I spent last weekend in Osaka, the craziest city ever, and then 2 days in Soni-mura, the smallest village ever (population: 2200). Anyway, back to the beer. So I purchased this beer for 584 yen, and by the time we left the hotel to start the evening, I was kind of...ahead of the game. I actually let Rob control the subway map and subsequent decisions, which we realized was a mistake six transfers later.