Little Cans

Hey y'all,... This is Gabe here. Steph and I went for a walk along the beautiful Kesen (kay-sehn) River today. This river flows right in front of our neighborhood. You can see Steph standing in front of it. Also, behind her, on the opposite bank, you can see many "Kuras" (koo-rahs) which are storage buildings for rice. The Japanese character for this kind of building is the first character of our name.....but, maybe I'll tell you more about that later. Well, back to today's story: When Steph and I reached the end of our walk -- the place where we took the picture -- we found a can that someone had sadly tossed on the ground (litter is REALLY rare here). So, Steph and I played "kick-the-can" all the way home in order to take the little guy home for recycling. He got pretty beat-up as you can see on the left. Actually, this kind of can is called a "bottle-can" and you can see that it's pretty small. Here in Japan it seems that there are about 3 or 4 choices of size and shape of your drink from a vending machine and almost all are small in comparison to the US sizes.

This afternoon Steph and I went grocery shopping and all my thinking about cans pushed me to snap this little pic in the grocery store beer section. Here you can see a regular 12 ounce sized beer appropriately named "Super Gent" (drinking this beer will make you a super gent--guaranteed! ) and to its immediate left you can see the japanese version of small beer ( 6 oz.?). To the left you can see what we think of as small and cute in the US (8 oz. ?)--the only place I have seen these are in Florida.
And,...above these beers you can see a little sign for Guiness for 298 yen...that's about $2.50 in case you were wondering ,...Robert. :)