As I mentioned in my previous post, I got Valentines chocolate from a few people, as is common in Japan…but the best ones were the chocolates that my daughters made me.
And also, the gift from my wife.
This year’s Valentine’s Day, my wife bought 「サッポロ ショコラブルワリー」 (“Sapporo Chocolat Brewery”) chocolate beer for me.
I love beer and I don’t have much of a sweet tooth…so this was perfect for me. It was a slightly dark beer with a hint of bitter chocolate.
A Canadian who’s living in Tokyo also wrote a post about this beer on is blog…click here to see his post.
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Also, Japan got it’s first two medals in the 2010 Olympics yesterday.
Both were in the Men’s 500 meter Speed Skating competition.
Keiichiro Nagashima won the silver and Joji Kato got bronze.
Tokyo Five 
Who can afford Space Beer?
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Not me for sure! 😉
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Thank you for the link. Happy belated Valentine’s Day – looks like you had a good one, with beer and chocolate!
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>…beer and chocolate!
In the same can! 😉
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I’m going to see if that is available in the states!
I’ve tried all kinds of strange beers…including hot pepper beer! (I do not recommend it.)
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>I’m going to see if that is available in the states!
I believe the American brewer Samuel Adams has a chocolate beer.
>I’ve tried all kinds of strange beers
Yeah, but have you tried Space Beer??
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I love the Germans!
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Do you like German beer?
Have you ever gone to an “Oktoberfest“?
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I am not the beer drinker I was in my youth, but I love real beer. When I have the opportunity to drink a single beer just for enjoyment, I prefer a heavy or dark beer.
Once again, in my youth, I attended Chicago area Oktoberfests a few times. I loved it!
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Yeah, Oktoberfest is great.
There is one every year in Yokohama, Japan.
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Oh I wanna taste this beer… we have lot’s of different kinds of beer over here in Germany, but I have never seen something like this (maybe I haven’t looked hard enough…^^).
Have you tried German beer before? 🙂
I have read somewhere that we Germans drink an average of 115l beer per year… And that we have 5000 different kinds 😛
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Yes, I have tried German beer…at an Oktoberfest.
It was good.
I can’t believe that they don’t sell Chocolate Beer in Germany!
BTW, you said that you’re twenty years old, right?
What’s the legal drinking age in Germany? I’m just wondering.
In America, it’s 21 (unless it’s been changed).
Here in Japan, the drinking age is 20.
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>> What’s the legal drinking age in Germany?
You are allowed to drink weak alcoholic drinks like beer when you are 16… For strong spirituous beverages like jägermeister it’s 18.
Since a few years they produce this beer mixed with cola, lemon, redbull and other stuff over here… tastes horrible, like they threw a pound of sugar in a bottle of beer, but that’s what all the minors drink when they party… The strangest beer I drank was Berliner Kindl (pils) with woodruff/raspberry taste… It was even sweeter than the regular mixed beer…. *barf*
btw, Funny how the first things (and sometimes the only things) that people associate with Germany are beer and the Oktoberfest ^^
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>beer when you are 16…
So young!
My oldest daughter is 16 now. I couldn’t imagine her drinking yet!
>beer mixed with cola, lemon, redbull and other stuff over here… tastes horrible
But they don’t sell chocolate beer?
In Japan, I’ve never seen beer with cola or anything like that…but they sell canned cocktails.
Some of them have cola…such as “Cola Shock“.
>Funny how the first things (and sometimes the only things) that people associate with Germany are beer and the Oktoberfest
There’s also Sauerkraut, sausage, “The Scorpions” (rock band), WW2-era Nazis (unfortunately), Volkswagen cars, Mercedes Benz cars, “The Autobahn“, and Beethoven.
What have I missed?
What are Japan and America well-known for in Europe?
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>>But they don’t sell chocolate beer?
I googled it and just found a brewery in Wales and Belgium who sells this kind of beer… There are a lot of small private breweries in Germany, so maybe one of them already tried that, I don’t know… They are mostly in southern Germany (Bavaria), that’s why I don’t hear a lot about it… I was there a few times because my father was born there and almost every small town has it’s own brewery 🙂
Oh, and there are a lot of people who drink wheat beer with banana juice, which tastes actually really good 😛
>>but they sell canned cocktails.
Yeah, that’s pretty common here as well. They are called Alcopops… There was a big uproar a few years ago in Germany because a lot of teenagers were drinking them until, let’s say, it wasn’t healthy anymore. They are so sweet that you can’t even taste the alcohol anymore. So they put a special tax on them (~1€ per 0,3l bottle) to make them unaffordable for the teenagers. They were only for 18+, but you can get everything if you really want it…
>>What have I missed?
not bad 😛 You know Anthony Bourdain? In the Berlin episode of his show he could think of “The Berlin Wall” and Kraftwerk as well 😀
>>What are Japan and America well-known for in Europe?
uhm… don’t really now… Japan I would say sushi, technology, samurai… stuff like that ^^
And the usa maybe for the so called “American Dream”? Haven’t really thought about those things 😛
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>Kraftwerk
If I was German I don’t think I’d acknowledge that terrible band as part of the culture. 😉
>Japan I would say sushi, technology, samurai… stuff like that
That’s about all I knew of Japan before I came here.
> usa maybe for the so called “American Dream”?
I expected you to say something like cowboys, fast-food, Hollywood movies, guns, etc. 😉
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>>I expected you to say something like cowboys, fast-food, Hollywood movies, guns, etc. 😉
hm now that you say it… 😉 But I don’t really see the USA as really different from Germany… Globalization is surely doing it’s work 😛
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Yes, the world is becoming smaller. But I bet Germany is still quite unique and different from America.
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I know what you mean 🙂 But movies, tv-shows, music and other stuff from the USA bring a lot of the American culture to us. McDonalds was just the first step and now people are even celebrating Halloween like they do in the USA, with all the trick or treat stuff… 🙂
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Halloween gets bigger every year in Japan (there was no Halloween in Japan at all when I first got here)…but it’s still quite different from “American-style” Halloween.
Trick ‘R Treating at the neighbor’s houses isn’t something most Japanese would feel comfortable doing.
So in Japan, kids can ask participating stores for a piece of candy at Halloween time by saying “Trick Or Treat”.
My post about it:
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The German government released some statistics about drug abuse over here… One statistic said, that the average age Germans start drinking alcohol is 13,2 years (it’s 18 by law). Well, that was shocking, even for me. No wonder society is going downhill…
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>Germans start drinking alcohol is 13,2 years
Do Europeans put a comma (,) in numerals where Americans would put a decimal point (.) or is that simply a typo?
Because I’m assuming that means 13.2 years old (which, I think, would be about 13 years and 9 weeks).
Quite young!
>it’s 18 by law
That’s young too.
In America, the drinking age is 21 years old.
In Japan, it’s 20.
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>>Do Europeans put a comma (,) in numerals where Americans would put a decimal point (.) or is that simply a typo?
well, thats at least how I learned it… and I put the (.) when I have to write very large numbers, like 1.000.000 (one million). But my calculator works the way you explained it.
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>I put the (.) when I have to write very large numbers, like 1.000.000 (one million)
And that would be the case that I would use commas (,)…ie: 1,000,000.
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