On Friday night after work I met up with Kuniko to try out Hola!Achaho in Sannomiya for dinner. This was our first time to try it, and we were very pleased to find that it has a similar menu and style to our old favorite, Sigassiga. While we ate and drank and talked Ms Fujiwara (the wife of the Sigassiga chef/owner) kept us in food and drink. It was nice to see her again, and near the end of the meal Mr Fujiwara himself dropped by and was surprised to see us. All in all a good night, and I’m sure we’ll be back to Hola!Achaho again soon.

The point of the dinner was to get together with Kuniko before her overnight trip on Saturday. Since I wasn’t going to be able to see her at all this weekend, we wanted to spend some time together relaxing. On Saturday morning she got up at the regular time (5:00 a.m.) and headed off to work. I tried to sleep in but in the end I got up as well, and did some chores around the house. Most of the day was pretty relaxing – doing some shopping, cleaning, and enjoying the beautiful weather. I bought some things to grill for dinner – spareribs, a small piece of salmon that was sold as sashimi, and a package of shiitake mushrooms.

In the early evening I got a phone call from Kuniko, and she said that she was heading home. Due to some drama with one of her students, her principal thought it would be best to skip the trip and stay home. She didn’t complain about his decision, and neither did I. We spent the evening partying (again) and toasting the health of her principal.

The grilled foods turned out OK. I was sure the spareribs would be delicious, but I wasn’t sure about the marinade I used for the shiitake mushrooms. As it turned out maybe a bit too much lemon juice. Any ideas for a good marinade for mushrooms? I’ll experiment a little more in the future. I was a little ambivalent about cooking the salmon, and cut a little bit off and ate it raw – it was excellent. In the end I glazed it with a little olive oil and Italian dressing and grilled it for just a few minutes. When you aren’t worried about whether it is raw or not then cooking it becomes a lot easier. The result was a very juicy and delicious cut of fish – the outside was seared but the inside was very tender – so I think it turned out OK.

Sunday we enjoyed having Kuniko around. In the morning some NTT guys came over and spent an hour or so upgrading our internet to a fiber optic connection. It turns out that it is about the same price as the DSL we were using before. After futzing with the passwords and my router for about an hour I finally got it working without installing their CD full of crapware and support software. Now our download speeds are around 2 megabytes per second – plenty fast for the time being.

Kuniko requested a Mexican dinner, so we picked up veggies at the store and made burritos full of beef, beans, avocados, cheese, lettuce and tomatoes. So good. There are enough leftovers for us to eat for a couple more nights as well.

I’m off to work soon. We have changed to ‘cool biz’ at work, which means for the next 3 months I don’t need to wear a tie or jacket. Still, today is pretty cloudy and so I’m still wearing a tie to work. The jacket can stay at home today, I think.