Saturday and Sunday were a couple of pretty relaxing days, and going into what will be a busy week socially, I’m feeling more rested than I have felt in a long time.
Saturday morning Kuniko was off to teach four classes, while I drove to the home center and did some shopping. It was a successful trip – I came back with some gardening supplies and some herbs to attempt to grow indoors. I’m not sure how well it will work, especially once it gets really cold and the sunlight during the day starts disappearing, but I’ll give it a try.
Kuniko and I cooked up some chicken on the BBQ, along with some grilled asparagus and shiitake mushrooms. The whole dinner cost less than 800 yen.
Sunday we drove over to visit Mr. Inoguchi in Miki. It was our first time to drive there, and because their address is pretty obscure, the iPhone wasn’t able to guide us to his door. Instead we got to the neighborhood, and luckily were able to remember where his place was from the last time we were there.
We had a delicious lunch there – spaghetti with sun dried tomato and olive sauce, lasagna stuffed with ricotta and a white cream sauce, along with plenty of green side dishes to keep things balanced. Mr. Inoguchi is really a good cook – we were lucky to get an invite. Next time they come over he requested Tex Mex, so I’ll have to start thinking about that.
His wife has been chosen to make a short address in English at an academic conference in Hong Kong, and so we talked about that. She sounded a little nervous, but I think she’ll do fine. I’ve never heard her say one word of English, so it should be an interesting adventure. We tried to encourage her while we were there, and if possible we might meet up before the conference in December to coach her a little bit.
The final stop for us was a shopping trip at the local shopping center for some supplies for the week, and by the time we finished shopping and organizing our household we ended up going out for 100 yen sushi. We didn’t eat much, but that’s the beauty of 100 yen sushi – you can choose exactly what you want to eat and how much of it you’d like. We walked out of there having only eaten 12 plates of sushi, and people were looking at us like we were crazy.
As I said before, I’ve got a busy schedule this week. Tomorrow I’ll go to tachinomi with a couple of the inspectors from work, Wednesday I’ll join some students for some kushikatsu in Sannomiya, then Friday Yoshi and I will go for pizza and beer in Kobe and Saturday we’ll join the Fukumi’s and Yamaji’s at the Fukumi household for a bon voyage party for Yuuki Yamaji who will move to Italy to study how to become a chef. Hopefully Sunday I’ll get some downtime…
