> everyone considers me a deviant for just wanting to start my day with cereal and milk
My ideas about breakfast were turned on their head many years ago when a German friend (his typical breakfast: rye bread, cheese, cured ham) remarked that he "can't understand how you can bear to eat sweet food first thing in the morning".
I suppose most of the world's breakfast traditions evolved from whatever is left over from the previous night's dinner. The idea of a custom synthetic breakfast food is quite an American thing.
In India we usually cook fresh breakfast food and it is mostly savory/spicy food.
tbf in most Indian urban homes going back even a few decades, we mostly just ate leftovers for breakfast before rushing off to school.
Eh? It’s still a very nice country if you put down roots. It’s certainly one of the best countries in terms of social cohesion/structure.
Japan doesn’t cease to amaze me even after 10 years.
Today I was put on a sort of medical gyroscope and made to drink burp and glowjuice as part of a yearly medical checkup, after which the guy proceeded to yell instructions at me in half broken english, while he presumably took multiple x-rays of my stomach and throat. I didn’t even know this existed, but apparently all men 35 and older do it once a year as a matter of course.
To balance that, Japanese people have a fairly different idea of what constitutes ‘normal’, and that is hard to get used to. For example, everyone considers me a deviant for just wanting to start my day with cereal and milk, and not wanting to eat a (warm!) multi-course meal for breakfast.