201–210 of 233 posts
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Are you kidding? The warm vending machine corn soup is the best thing in winter!
I guess it's an acquired taste — and this is coming from someone who feels a nattō sandwich is a great way to start the day when in Japan¹. 1: The fermented beans compensate for the lousy fibreless bread, and it sure beats rice for breakfast. The mustard is a must-have though.
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I don't want to cast aspersions on Belgium, but that's atypical. My experience is that wherever you are in the world, McDonald's is usually reliable for its food (you know what you're getting, even if you're not a huge fan of it) and its decent toilets. (I admit there may be some residual rose-tinted-ness to my opinion here, after staying on a Greek island years ago; after days struggling with the idiosyncratic local…
Continuing on your Greek tangent, Greek pipes are generally not built to handle paper products, therefore you are supposed to throw it in a small trash bin, which may sound disgusting but they generally are rather airtight and you honestly don't smell anything if you use them properly. The alternative is clogging the pipes, which from my experience living in multiple Greek cities, happens a lot especially due to the…
Which seems odd, given how cheap plungers are in comparison to service employees.
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I don't want to cast aspersions on Belgium, but that's atypical. My experience is that wherever you are in the world, McDonald's is usually reliable for its food (you know what you're getting, even if you're not a huge fan of it) and its decent toilets. (I admit there may be some residual rose-tinted-ness to my opinion here, after staying on a Greek island years ago; after days struggling with the idiosyncratic local…
Really? I don't recall ever having used a clean McDo toilet. I can clearly recall filthy toilets in France, Belgium & the UK. I'm not sure where you frequent McDo, but it sounds to me like your experience is more atypical than mine.
Maybe I'll have to start frequenting them more and reviewing their toilets ;)
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"Aside from providing warm drinks, that's the big ticket right there: IME, european vending machines are basically predatory, they're way overpriced for what they provide and rely on necessity or impulse rather than just doing good business." Absolutely agree: I don't remember the last time I bought something from a public vending machine (or even seeing someone else doing so) here in Spain. Prices are anywhere betwe…
Same here. I never buy from vending machines in the US or Europe. In Japan, the prices are low and the quality good, so I bought several things, including ice cream. There's no way I'd buy the garbage ice cream we make in America from a vending machine, but the stuff in Japan is pretty good and a nice treat on a hot day, and was only Y140.
edit: by soft-serve, I mean any of the thinner ice cream/frozen yogurt alternatives as opposed to the (usually very thick) real ice cream.
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Thank you for articulating this. I've noticed these kinds of comments are common on reddit, and since becoming a mod of a reasonably popular subreddit they've irked me, but I allowed them in the interest of free-ish speech/not wanting to be authoritarian, and also because I couldn't articulate exactly what the problem was. After all, I didn't think criticism of a given subreddit was categorically bad. This: > It's al…
So I've been lurking on HN for over a decade...the moderators here are very very good at fostering good discussion while eliminating toxicity. If you want to be a better moderator of any internet community you'd do well to study how it's done here.
I also just came back from Tokyo and Osaka; I was blown away by how many 7/11s there were and how close they were. The vending machines are amazing. One other thing I would like to import: the widely available, clean bathrooms all over the place. That was super nice.
>One other thing I would like to import: the widely available, clean bathrooms all over the place. That was super nice. Don't forget how almost every public restroom even has a washlet. But we can't have these things in the US. Americans can't even be bothered to flush the toilet, and like to scrawl graffiti on bathroom walls. The only way we'd have the super-clean public bathrooms of Japan is to keep them locked, or…
Although I'll pass on the camera monitoring.
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I had the same experience. I had to try the hot canned coffee; I didn't try it again. Also: canned mixed drinks! Japan is truly living in the future.
IMO the vending machines aren't the future; they're the manifestation of a different future. When cities start industrializing, one of the first things that consistently pops up are food vendors on the street taking up public right-of-way. Food preparation is a skill that doesn't need education, people working the long shifts of industrializing societies need to eat quickly, and new city-dwellers miss their regional…
Exactly: this is the same reason the wonderfully-appointed and utterly spotless Japanese public bathrooms are completely impossible in America. They'd be filled with graffiti, the washlet and other devices abused and broken, and dirty toilet paper left on the floor and urine sprayed all over within hours.
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Same here. I never buy from vending machines in the US or Europe. In Japan, the prices are low and the quality good, so I bought several things, including ice cream. There's no way I'd buy the garbage ice cream we make in America from a vending machine, but the stuff in Japan is pretty good and a nice treat on a hot day, and was only Y140.
Slightly OT, but I haven't heard this: are the vending machines in Japan dispensing real ice cream and not soft-serve? Very interesting, if so I would imagine the mechanics have to be far more robust/complicated. Or is it still soft-serve, but just higher-quality? edit: by soft-serve, I mean any of the thinner ice cream/frozen yogurt alternatives as opposed to the (usually very thick) real ice cream.
Yes, I imagine these machines would have to be pretty robust to maintain those temperatures in Japan's hot climate.
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>One other thing I would like to import: the widely available, clean bathrooms all over the place. That was super nice. Don't forget how almost every public restroom even has a washlet. But we can't have these things in the US. Americans can't even be bothered to flush the toilet, and like to scrawl graffiti on bathroom walls. The only way we'd have the super-clean public bathrooms of Japan is to keep them locked, or…
Even pay-per-use won't solve that problem though. Have you ever been unfortunate enough to use a truck-stop shower? Not an experience I would recommend; after several weeks of motorcycle camping I started to think I would be better-served renting a cheap motel room. Although I'll pass on the camera monitoring.
Just came back from Japan and man are there too many convenience stores. Within any given area there is probably 6 to 7 stores within eyeshot and an easy walk. It's weird thinking that they are too convenient, but honestly they start to become pointless. More than once we simply walked by a few knowing that there would be another one just a minute or two more down the street. It's great that we could find something t…
They probably have the density and business to support it. Like how the USA having so many gas stations everywhere might seem bizarre to someone from another country (e.g. gas stations in China are definitely nowhere near as numerous).