The Sistine Chapel Exhibit and Japanese Treat Haul Spring 2022

Sistine Chapel Frescoes Up Close

I haven't posted in a bit as I'm pretty busy with doing some major cleanup work in the basement of the house and have had a nice field trip down to Calgary for my dad's 81st birthday.  While I was down in Calgary, I managed to catch the Sistine Chapel Exhibition that features Michelangelo's fantastic fresco ceiling art.  I saw the ceiling before when I visited the Vatican decades ago and it was pretty cool, but you can't see them up close as they are 20 metres above your head.  This exhibit showed the frescoes up close with high resolution photographic blowups at a 1 to 1 scale and it was very cool to see the restored colours, the painter's detail for musculature and shading, and even the marks where he outlined the images to paint.  The exhibit wasn't mind blowing, but it was very enjoyable to get out and see something new/old after all the COVID shutdowns. 

While I was down there I also managed to hit up a fancy little food court called the The DISTRICT at Beltline in downtown Calgary.  It is pretty new and on the main floor of a technology building that houses IBM and other tech companies so it is probably pretty busy at lunch.  There's all kinds of gourmet food available here from handmade burgers, fancy vegetarian meals, Korean, sushi at Greenfish, and ramen at Oishidesu.  I had ramen of course, and tried a very tasty cod roll too.  Not tons of seating if it was bustling, but it was pretty easy to get a seat on a Sunday morning.

Two kinds of ramen, and a chicken rice bowl.  Quite tasty overall!

I also tried Pablo, a Japanese cheesecake bakery from Japan.  I'm not sure if these are corporate or franchises.  The regular cheesecake was okay, but the the fruit flavoured ones, especially the strawberry were really good!

Pablo mini-cheese tarts!

Bought a six pack of different flavours.  Chocolate was good too, but the fruit ones were the best I think.

Very tasty strawberry!

 

2022 Spring Japanese Snack Haul

Now, onwards to the Spring Snack haul.  In Canada, it is pretty hard to get things shipped over from Japan right now due to limited cargo flights.  You can ship some things by courier, but it is way too expensive to do this for me.  I've been buying things from local Asian supermarkets in Calgary and Edmonton instead.  I also did place an order of snacks from Sukoshi Mart in Toronto too.

I'm looking forward to trying this MRE style of soybean sauce rice bowl from Taiwan.  It is self-heating and full of little packages inside.  I'll review it in detail at a later date!

Lightly battered and fried squid.  Quite squiddy and tasty if you like squid.

I managed to pick up a big box of ramen at T&T.  The price has gone up a little, which isn't surprising these days.  I've review the Kyushu Marugoto Ramen Pack from Marutai before, and they have changed out one of the noodles for a spicy one!  I'll post a review of the new one later.

This was a nice find.  Plum wine liqueur chocolates.  There were three varieties of plum wine and they were all really good with the dark chocolate.  They were all wrapped like little barrels.

I actually haven't had these in awhile.  I like these these crunchy, yet not hard, french fry potato chips.  They were the first to make these and there are other brands on the market now.

Nothing like curry flavoured potato chips.  These use House Brand curry and I found them a little sweeter than the normal curry chips from Calbee.

This was the big snack haul from Sukoshi Mart.

Some strawberry chocolates with flavours from across Japan.  A Crunky bar with a Demonslayer tie-in.

I ordered a couple of these little chocolate and candy variety packs.  I forgot how small these packages are.  They are a mouthful in each little box, so ration them out!

Some chewy candies with cola, ramune, and melon flavours.

These were very interesting and tasty hard strawberry flavoured candies.  It is amazing they can make them taste like strawberry cake and strawberries and cream.  Wow.

Mikan mochi - quite tasty with very good mandarin flavour that even has some orange peel in it.

Ramune gummies.

Plum flavoured chewy candy.  A nice flavour treat.

I was intrigued by these.  Meltykiss are almost alway good and the vanilla flavour came through so nicely.  Super good.  I've even been to Tahiti, but I couldn't tell you if it was truly Tahitian vanilla in flavour.

Some deluxe tonktostu ramen.

Your regular Marutai tonkotsu ramen.

Dehydrated clam chowder.  I'm always interested to see how some of this food actually comes through.

Finally, some green tea with yuzu.  I've tried this, but I'm not nuts about it.

Types of Japanese canned fish.  Your have saury, sardine, and tuna in soy or miso flavours.  I usually have them with white rice, Chinese pickles, and miso soup for breakfast on some mornings.

Well, that's all for now, so catch ya later with some new reviews.

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