Thursday night after work Kuniko and I were sitting around the living room thinking about where we should go to celebrate my birthday. Our first thought was to check with Chiemi. Kuniko’s old school friend is an expert on picking good Italian restaurants, and within 15 minutes she had done some research and presented us with her top three choices for the Osaka area. Wow!
We picked the best looking one, called La Cantinetta, and made a reservation for three. Chiemi would give us a guided tour of their menu in person.
When we arrived we discovered that the chef was actually an Italian guy, which is a little rare. He spoke great English and really made us feel welcome. We ordered from all over the menu and everything he brought out was great – including a baked lasagne style dish that was a mind-blower. Chiemi brought a birthday bouquet for me, and we had a nice evening watching the customers come and go. There was no wine list, as the Luca (the chef) said that nobody bothered to read it, so we selected a bottle based on the region that I wanted, and came dangerously close to ordering a $200 bottle of Barolo. In the end we went with a Valpolicella Classico Superiore that really went nicely with the rich pasta dishes.
Hopefully we’ll be back soon – Osaka offers a whole lot more culinary attractions than what we get in Kobe, and it feels like we’ve just scratched the surface.
The rest of the weekend was pretty low key. We enjoyed the cool weather, and grilled some vegetables, did some laundry, and spent time just recovering from our work week. It was nice to have a couple of days to get over my cough, and today it feels like it is nearly gone. We’ll see once I start talking to students, though.
Oh, and one other interesting event happened this morning. I was walking from our house to the train station, at around 5:15 am. The streets were empty and it was dead silent, as usual. As I walked I could see the faintest flashing of lights on the horizon, and at first I thought it was just my eyes playing tricks on me, but after closer scrutiny it appeared to be a plane. This plane was very high up, and I could barely make it out as it headed away from me to the southwest.
I opened up an application on my phone that some of my students recommended to me. It shows the air traffic around you at the moment, and at that time of morning there was only one plane around me. It was an EVA Airlines flight from Los Angeles to Taipei. I could easily imagine the passengers on board, packed into economy under blankets in the dark cabin, with just a couple more hours left in their 11 hour flight. How I envied them their arrival in Taipei and all the good food that they’d be able to enjoy. Maybe it was because we’ve spent so much time on long distance flights but I could easily imagine that planeload of passengers and what they must be feeling like as they fly unknowingly over a American guy walking to the train station in a quiet Japanese town.
