Soft Serve

In Japan, summers are very hot and humid. Many people like refreshment and relief from the harsh summer sun. Where I live, which is a small-ish city in the Midwest, people get refreshments from ice cream parlors, drive through ice cream shops such as Dairy Queen, or they get icy drinks or shakes from places like McDonald's. In Japan, however, there is a slightly different type of refreshment. America has soft serve ice cream, and Japan does too. But in Japan, there are a plethora of different flavors. There are also ice cream stalls and stands that sell soft serve on the street. The ice cream is cheap and delicious. Green tea, or macha, is very popular in Japan. The green tea soft serve is one of the most popular flavors. There are also other flavors such as red bean (also known as azuki), mango (mango in japanese is just mango, but pronounced differently), peach (or momo), plum (or ume), and watermelon (or suika). All of these delicious flavors are very refreshing on a hot day. Ice cream is most popular in the summer, but it is also sold in the spring as well. Hot summer days are perfect for getting your favorite ice cream treat. Larger cities in America, such as New York or Washington D.C. have stands that sell ice cream, but usually it's scooped out of chilled, metal containers. Soft serve machines need constant energy to run, so they must be plugged in. They also use a lot of energy, because the machines must constantly spin the soft serve mix to keep it from freezing or melting to a consistency that wouldn't hold up in a swirl on a cone. Still, Japanese soft serve stands are very refreshing in the summer.

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