Office Glico

I keep a drawer of my desk at worked stocked with after-lunch desserts and snacks - a ziploc bag of California almonds and walnuts, the sack of pastel-hued jelly beans my mom sent me last spring, a lollipop or two, the individually wrapped, teeny tiny cookies that are so ubiquitous here. But lately my drawer has started to run dry, and after a whole week of nothing but nuts, I decided it was time to pay a visit to the pantry for some Office Glico.

The pantry is what we all call the corner room on my floor of the office; it's where the free drink machines, the hot water and coffee, and the paper towels, plastic utensils, and extra chopsticks are kept. On a clear fall day like the one we had earlier this week, when I snapped the picture above, the pantry is also a great place to see Mount Fuji rising above the skyscrapers of the Kanto plain. And, of course, the pantry is home to Office Glico.

Office Glico is a snack-vending service. Several times a week, a representative wheels a big pushcart filled with rice crackers, cookies, gum, candy, pretzels, meal-replacement bars, and so forth, through the office to restock three plastic bins that stand on our pantry counter. If you catch the Glico lady, you can have your choice of all her wares. Otherwise, you're limited to what she decides to bestow upon the limited number of little plastic drawers. Any Glico treat costs 100 yen, which is deposited into a frog-shaped bank on top of the Glico bins, on the honor system. Of course, if you manage to catch the Glico lady in person, you can just give her your coin, no frog intermediaries required.

Since I was feeling like chocolate today, and my options were limited (no Glico lady in sight), I chose something I've never had before - this "Prime Gateau." It consisted of a pastille of dark chocolate, imprinted with a fleur de lis on one side, and melded to a crisp green tea cookie on the other. As usual, each tiny little cookie-chocolate was individually wrapped in its own plastic wrapper. This turned out to be a good thing, for once - after eating one, I decided it was so delicious that I should save the other three for next week and have a few jelly beans for the rest of my dessert. After all, who knows when next the Glico lady will choose to leave us with Prime Gateau again?