It is still winter. It is still too cold for the duck and my liking. It is the perfect time to write more about the one outside activity the duck and I enjoy all year round. The last time we dedicated a blog post to our adventures in grocery shopping, the duck and I were living in Tokyo. We had set off on our first grocery trip full of hopes and aspirations. We returned with a bag filled with confusion, sensory overload, and a little bit of food. Don’t get me wrong, we loved going grocery shopping in Tokyo. It felt like an adventure until our last days in this exciting city (the sunglasses and imaginary leather jackets we were going to use as our regular grocery shopping outfit once we’d figured out every aspect of it never left our wardrobe). Now we live in Berlin, which, surprisingly, is not at all like Tokyo. When it comes to grocery shopping here, I’m much more optimistic. Now that the duck and I have been educated about the burning ambition of the common pantry moth, not much could stop us on our quest to grocery shopping mastery.
Just look at the duck’s exploits! Those who have read about our grocery shopping adventures in Japan might already suspect how much we love buying our food in German supermarkets and grocery stores (and sometimes even drugstores). Gosh, we love grocery shopping so much that we could probably write a post about it every week for a year and never run out of topics. This is why the duck and I decided to limit ourselves to writing a comparison (in many, many words) between our experiences grocery shopping in Tokyo and in Berlin:
shopping
Drugstore discoveries
If you’ve been following us for a while you might be aware of how much the duck and I like talking and writing about food and grocery shopping, our favorite kind of shopping! In Japan our #1 place of wonder and excitement were Konbinis (yes, all of them. Collectively). We were so amazed that we dedicated a sonnet to them once. Now that we live in Berlin and have realized that pining for our beloved Japanese convenience stores daily is not healthy, we have decided that it is time to appoint a #2 to be pining for when we move to another country yet again: German drugstores! 
Look, here is the duck posing with a Berlin-exclusive bottle of shower gel we got at our local drugstore (that is only a brisk 20-minute walk away from our bed). Beautiful! The most beautiful thing about the duck and my favorite drugstore, however, is the selection of affordable packaged organic food (the material of some of our more prominent daydreams in Japan) and the cute little design elements you can find throughout the store. During our most recent trip we made use of my phone camera and snapped a few of our favorite things, products and design elements alike. Let us now take you along on a little stroll through our #2 place of wonder and excitement: Continue reading
An Ode to 100 Yen Shops
It’s no secret that the duck and I live our lives as perpetually penny-pinching personalities to the fullest. Therefore it is self-evident that we enjoy the casual shop at a 100 yen shop (well, ¥108 if you add the sales tax) – if we ever muster the courage to venture beyond our comfort zone (=past the neighborhood Konbini), that is.
The first time we entered such a palace of low-priced magic (which, and I think we can all agree on that, is the best kind of magic) the duck and I were impressed by the great selection of items (I’m writing food, decoration, toiletries, stationery, craft material, clothing items, cleaning products, toys, souvenirs, gardening tools, pet supplies, common household items, electronic goods, kitchenware, etc.) and the relatively good quality of most of them (which, let’s face it, you don’t always find at a Dollar Tree or Poundland). This is why we devote our second piece of fauxetry to Japan’s glorious hyaku-en-shoppus:
The Duck in... side 