Yakisoba Size

A fun gap that shows up when you’re in a relationship with someone with a different cultural background from yourself is how you relate information. Most cases it does not matter at all. Except when cooking though you kind of want it at least vaguely in a good shape. If you cut something too big, it might be good for soup, but it might not cook all the way through on the pan. I was helping out S with chopping some veggies for dinner and she hands me a carrot to cut. And I ask how big? And her reaction was: Yakisoba size. Ah, yes… uh, what? I’ve had yakisoba before, but I couldn’t tell you how big the carrats tend to be in it. I still do not have a good reference of what is a good size for it. I know it’s not the tiny cubes we do for the rice omlette.

Relative sizes are probably where this comes up the most. I was ordering a book online and I checked with S on why one of the books was literally half the price of the other¹. Oh, that’s bunko size. Right, bunko size. I had recognized the book size, after she showed me. But I didn’t know the name. It’s a standard size for a lot of Japanese paperbacks. They’re a cute size²! Fits in your pocket well. I coincidentally bought two books of that size this week. One was a Japanese book, ツバキ文具店, that I haven’t heard anything about, but wikipedia mentioned it’s had a drama made and it even had an English translation (I bought it in Japanese, we’ll see how it goes). The second book I got was Luis Mendo’s Mundo Mendo Book One which is very cute book of essays and illustrations. I do not have a lot of books in this size yet. But I am thinking to fix that.

Mendo’s book has really nice quality paper in it. I’ve been reading so much in my e-reader that I had started to think again about the physicality of it. There’s a lot of good and bad for the e-readers. Living in a foreign country, it’s a bit of a pain in the butt to find physical books in English. Stores or libraries here might have a few of the big names in English editions. But you’re looking at a pretty small section. Buying digitally online opens up my available selection by a lot. Not to mention it does not physically take up space. Need more books in bunko size though. I could probably fit 40% more books onto my bookshelf if they were all bunko sized. Programming books tend to go big. But this last year or two does not have me wanting to read a lot of programming books.

I am almost finished up with my forth oil painting. I was going to move on to trying to start practicing painting people after I finished this lil bird. But the day I was thinking I would finish up painting, I had a new idea and started chasing it. I will get started on painting disproportionate people soon enough.

Oh yeah, you should listen to PAON.