Today is a national holiday to celebrate the coming of Autumn, and so we got to sleep in and have a relaxing morning. I got a message from Antoine wanting to meet up, but since we had plans already this evening, I went into Sannomiya to have lunch with him.
Kuniko let me borrow her commuter passes for the train so I didn’t have to pay anything to get there – a big bonus. Round trip it costs me around $12 to get to Sannomiya, the heart of Kobe. I met Antoine in front of the movie theater and we walked around town until we settled on Chinese food in Chinatown.
We ate lots of gyoza and some nikuman, and washed it down with cold oolong tea. We chatted about the upcoming year – it’ll be a pivotal year for both of us. Antoine is going to try to stay in Japan and find a good job here. He’s a little worried about the timing, and whether he can make enough money to sustain himself here.
I stopped in at a local store to buy some garlic paste. There are a lot of stores in Chinatown that specialize in non-Japanese Asian foods – things from Thailand, Korea, the Phillipines, etc. While I was getting the garlic an old guy spoke broken English and tried to get us to buy other (more expensive) things. He tried to get us to buy a monster jar of garlic, and then advertised the flavor of little chips that he said had lard inside. He took the jar off the shelf, twisted off the lid, pulled back the safety seal, and had us smell inside. We agreed that it smelled good, and then he put the safety seal back on, put the lid back on, and put the jar back on the shelf. Yikes!
On our travels we found a new import foods store near the station. Import food stores in Japan are pretty much the same wherever you go. They have the same items, probably because they buy them all from the same wholesaler. This store was different – they were buying products from somewhere else. I scored a could of containers of Stagg chili, and some Kraft macaroni and cheese. They had some pretty good beers there, too. Still no cake frosting, though. That’s apparently impossible to buy in Japan.
I came back in the afternoon and hung out with Kuniko, and then we gathered up our gear, drove to Carrefour to buy steaks, and took everything over to Kageyama headquarters in Kakogawa to cook dinner for her folks. The steaks were decent sized, and pretty fairly priced. I rubbed them with garlic, olive oil, salt, and some spicy rub from America. Then we panfried them quickly and served them up. We also served some microwaved potatoes, but they weren’t completely microwaved and some of them were a little tough. They had to go in again to finish up. We also had a good bottle of wine from JVB vineyards in Kenwood. We picked it up on our last trip to America and it went really well with the red meat.
Kuniko and I finished our meat quickly, but her father and mother savored theirs and ate slowly. I don’t think they have steaks much – it’s still considered a luxury item. It was good to cook for them for a change and give Kuniko’s mom a break.
Kuniko borrowed their sewing machine for a school project that she is working on, and we took off around 10 p.m.
Instead of heading home we drove all the way to the Akashi bridge, and enjoyed walking along the water and taking in the view. It was breezy but not cold – a perfect night to be out there. There were fishermen along the water, too – they were using glowsticks and little lights on their lines to catch fish. When they cast the line out, you could see the glowstick arcing against the night sky and finally drop into the dark water.
We waited around for the lights to change color on the bridge, and then heading home. Along the street there were cars parked – some cars with all tricked out and looked like gangster wagons from L.A., and some had couples inside who can’t afford a love hotel. We jumped in the car and drove back along the water to Futami, and we hit the rack. There’s still two days left in the weekend!
