Oregon food: Uwajimaya

I feel like I wrote this entry already, but I can't find it.

Clinton and I went to a monstrously large Asian food market in Beaverton called Uwajimaya. Clinton says it's about half the size of the one in Seattle, and doesn't have the non-MSG choices the Seattle one has.

I gotta say it's overwhelming.

Walking into the first aisle, floor to ceiling with alien colors, big Japanese text, and not a lick of English was an overload. I didn't know where to look. I walked down the aisle trying not to miss anything, but being visually pummelled and pushed from shelf to shelf. "What IS this?" It would be like an Estonian from 1953 walking unprepared into the detergent aisle at Safeway. Wearing 3-D glasses.
I've never been a mid-century Estonian, but I have worn 3D glasses in the detergent aisle.

Pretty frickin' cool. I bought a bunch of cheaper beverages to try. I didn't want to get anything I didn't think I'd drink, and I didn't want anything that cost FIVE DOLLARS. There were some mighty spendy beverages, mostly weird Hawaiian-flavored things with Japanese writing.
I got some Lichee drink, which was good, but ended with kind of a grainy texture, some Strawberry Milk Tea which was super-yummy, and Max wants me to get a lot more.

Also some "Hello Boss" canned coffee. I got that in memory of the canned coffee I bought Angelina at the "Happy Super" Chinese market on Clement Street in San Francisco. We had that can for YEARS. It said "drink on Feb 31", so, y'know, we could never drink it.
(We lived over the Happy Super for a couple months right after we got married, and I remember watching them deliver whole dead pigs right under our window. Years later, I went into the City to visit my friend Tara at The Other Place when she was a bartender there, and passed by the Happy Super, only to find all its stuff out on the street and Going Out of Business signs in the window. I took a 'frozen food' sign which graces our freezer to this day.)

Anyway... we didn't buy an entire roast pig, and we didn't get any steam-table Chinese... but we could have.

I did buy some chocolate-covered mushroom cookies and some milky popsicles, and Clinton and I each bought an indecipherable box of something that seemed really exciting. Like tiny somethings, but we couldn't tell what. The shelves we got them off had what may have been little boxes of plastic models of things like "Secretary coming through door", and "Spacy Housewife", but we couldn't tell.

Our spider-senses did not fail us. My box (which I got for Angelina, because she loves weird tiny shit) had a tiny plastic Meat Gift Box, where you put the stickers on the meat, constructed the box, and packaged it all up. Whoa. The whole thing is about an inch and a half long.

Clinton's had the goods, though. It was things you might stock a convenience store with. A roll of film, a film canister to put it in, and a tiny box you construct to put the canister inside of. Tiny candies. Salt? Gum?