A brand new kind of post on this blog: the Q&A section, which does not report facts and figures of our day by day japanese trip, but tries to put the focus on facts, habits, ways and means, situations... that we encountered in Japan and that surprised us, amused us, let us speechless...etc.

For the first post of this kind, let's interest to "combini". Combini is for "Convenient store", that kind of store you can find anywhere in the US, and which is very popular and well spread in Japan too! For the record, it is "comBini" and not "ConVini" because the V sound does not exist in japanese, and the closest sound is B.

The purpose of a Combini is that it is open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. You can find anything in it : food (hot and cold), beverage (hot and cold), pharmacy, ATM, beauty supplies, xerox machine, hot water for tea, coffee or instant noodles...etc.

There are several combini companies : the most popular is certainly 7-eleven, but you can also find Lawson, Family-Mart, and many others...

One of our favourite product in a combini is Pocky (thanks to N. !).
In France, you would call it "Mikado", but here, it is Pocky, and there are so many (surprising) flavours: classical chocolate, less classical milk chocolate, surprising strawberry, astonishing banana/chocolate, even more dazing custard cake/strawberry... and I think we haven't seen them all !

Anyway, Pocky is your friend when you are feeling a bit peckish ;-)