Dizzy over Daiso

Last Sunday afternoon, I finally got to shop at Daiso = The 100 Yen Store.
This Daiso is located in Daly City, and is one of the first, if not the first Daiso in California.

I always consider myself lucky when finding good items at discounted prices, and am always on the hunt. Daiso is chock-full of such finds. No hunting necessary. Just open your eyes and there are goodies everywhere.
The deals are even better than the legendary KMart 'blue light specials'.

Shopping at Daiso is such a blast!
Not only are the items useful in and of themselves, there's plenty there to get the artsy-crafty juices flowing if you're of a creative bent.

Accompanied by DollinkDaughterLLS, DollinkSon-in-LawD and HubbyDear, the lot of us mingled with other heavy-into-discount-prices shoppers. The joint was jumpin', as most Bay Area stores are on the weekends. Particularly the ones offering great prices for great stuff....

Some weeks earlier, DollinkDaughter LLS spent two full hours scoping out the place.
On this second visit, she already had a 'lay of the land' and knew where to herd her hapless momma through the maze of goods.

It would have been impossible to pick up and consider each and every one of the thousands upon thousands of items, so we did the 'quickish scan n' shop' method, trying to keep in mind only to buy what we simply could not live without...

Most of the goods in Daiso are practical, beautiful, cute, funny or downright odd. The best stuff of course is the weird stuff.
It's really too much to describe here. Definitely a see-it-to-believe-it place.

The majority of packaging is in Japanese, but if you don't read Japanese, no worries.
If the shopper isn't already familar with what an item might be used for, all he/she has to do is investigate the packaging.

There you're likely to find cartoon-y illustrations accompanied by small print instructions about the product. These can provide an amusing as well as fair-to-clear indication of what some of the more mysterious of 'mystery items' might be used for.
Half the fun is trying to figure out what something is!

(Fans of Engrish can have ahelluvagoodtime just studying the great packaging)

About an hour later, and in something of a daze - I finally found myself standing in the check-out line with a total of 33 items in my shopping cart. I parted with $54 to purchase them all.

Huzzah! for Daiso!