On Monday Kuniko leaves for her school trip to Okinawa. She’ll be gone for most of the week, touring Okinawa, seeing the war memorial, eating lots of good food, and trying to keep track of squads of schoolgirls as they run riot all over the island.
She wanted to do some shopping for the trip, and so I met her in Kobe in the afternoon to look around with her. She bought a new dictionary to replace the one that died, and it sure is a nice one. It has some shortcuts that makes things quicker, but I’m sure there’s a lot more that it can do. It’s also got a secure digital card slot and a USB connection, which is pretty cool. Theoretically you could load up a document in English or Japanese in the dictionary, and then translate it piece by piece.
Kuniko bought me a present at a T-shirt store. I’m a sucker for the bad English T-shirts, and this one is great. It has a cartoon drawing of a beer – above the beer it says “GET A BEER. I think I need some cheer me up make.” Excellent!
We also got some other critical items, and then had dinner at AsianDays, a dimsum restaurant that has an all-you-can-eat special that’s a great deal. We were starving, and we ate big. I love just going crazy saying I’ll take 4 of these, and 2 of these. You can’t be shy in a place like this.
By the time I see Kuniko on the weekend she’s usually pretty tired out, and I was really hoping to get her rested up for her trip. We went home early and relaxed around the house, did a little studying, and then went to bed early.
The next day we slept late. Once you get by the guilt of staying in bed that long it’s really quite refreshing. We got almost 12 hours of sleep, and Kuniko looked like she could do more.
We did some more shopping at Carrefour, and I was shocked to find steak knives there on sale – I’ve had to find them in fancy stores because steaks are a little different here, and somewhat (if you’ll excuse the expression) rare. I had paid 450 yen for each of the four steak knives that I had found – That’s 4 bucks a knife. At Carrefour I found a set of three steak knives for 80 yen – That’s three for 80 cents. Ouch! I bought two sets just out of principle.
I also made a great discover while searching through the French wines in the wine section. They had misfiled some 2003 Hangtime Santa Lucia Highlands Pinot Noir, and so I picked up a bottle for 20 bucks. It’s hard to find Pinot Noir here, and it’s one of my favorite varietals. I’m hoping the wine survived it’s long trip over here.
I managed to get Kuniko home for another nap, and then we went over to her folks place for dinner.
Earlier last week Kuniko’s father had sent me a present through Kuniko – some beer coupons. I’ve never seen anything like them, but you present the coupon at any store, and you can pick two free bottles of beer (633 ml each!). He gave me six coupons, so I’m stocked on beer. To pay him back I bought a six pack of beer at Carrefour – it’s a mixed six pack from all over the world – two from Italy, one from Canada, one from Spain, one from Tahiti, and the last one from England. I presented him with the cold beer and he had a couple with dinner.
We had chirashi sushi (literally “mixed up vinegar rice”) with sashimi on the side, some bean sprouts with pork, and a big slice of broiled fish that was really good. It was a very healthy dinner and it tasted great. I’m eating good over here.
Kuniko drove me home and I said goodbye from there. I hope she’s well rested for her trip and the kids don’t drive her crazy!
