It has been a little while since I’ve written! Last weekend was a lot of fun, and despite the lingering effects of a cold it went pretty well.

Friday I went out with Antoine after work to try a burger place in Motomachi. Unfortunately it wasn’t quite in the same league as Star Child, but it had a nice atmosphere and the burgers were definitely above average. I’d go back there again if the opportunity presented itself. The staff wasn’t really friendly, though, so I think I should go with someone talkative (like Antoine) next time.

Afterwards we hit a couple of places around Sannomiya before calling it a night. Since I was recovering from a cold it was probably best to wrap things up early.

The next day I could spend at home doing chores, reading and watching TV, and generally not using my voice. In the morning my new exercise bike was delivered, so I spent about an hour assembling it – it is a little more complex (and expensive) compared to the previous bike. Hopefully it will last longer!

I felt much better by the afternoon, and was in great shape by the time I arrived in Sannomiya once again to meet Kuniko, Yoshi, Mamiko and Akira for Thai food at Baan Thai. We really pigged out and ordered lots of dishes, and it was fun to try some dishes for the first time. It had been more than a year since I had been to the restaurant, so it was fun to be back.

It turns out that Yoshi will go with some friends to Thailand this July, so he was interested in the food as a matter of preparation. Akira did well with the dishes, even though some of them were a little spicy.

After dinner Kuniko wanted to introduce them to her favorite cheese shop, Reims. It had been a while since I had been there as well, and they had really increased their wine selection. They had lots of unique wines from all over, and some from all price points. We couldn’t resist ordering a small plate of cheese to share with a glass of champagne for each of us (except Akira). In the French style, it was cheese for dessert. We also bought some cheese and wine to take home for the weekend. Yum.

Sunday we spent at home giving Kuniko a break. We did a little shopping but mainly stayed at home sipping sparkling wine, taking naps, and watching movies.

Monday I came home to find that the internet connection in our home was down, and I spent a frustrating hour or so trying to track down the problem. The internet plays a big part in just about everything we do for entertainment at home, so I wanted to get it back up as soon as possible. I didn’t solve the problem on Monday, but did get it worked out in just a few minutes on Tuesday evening. Seems a piece of equipment overheated and reset, and that caused all sorts of trouble down the line. It was a pretty easy fix in the end.

Tonight after work we’re going to Costco to stock up on the usual goods. We’ve got a party this Saturday, so we’ve got to get some supplies. I’m going to make a simple Mexican dinner for some of my coworkers… I hope they like it.

So that should bring us up to date. I can’t believe that July is here already. I received my summer bonus from the company which is always a treat, and it is just a few weeks until I get a whole week off from work for their “power-saving holiday”. What shall I do with all that time off?

Just when I thought I was about over the cold, it came back to haunt me. I’ve had a sore throat the last couple of days, and so that leads to coughs and an even more sore throat. Ugh. Summer colds are the worst.

It is bad timing, too, since I am planning on going out to dinner with Antoine tonight after work. I can’t cancel on him – I had to cancel the last time we had plans for another reason – so I warned him that I’m not at 100% and we’ll see how it goes. He said he’ll order up some Jell-O shots for me.

Tomorrow we’ve got reservations at Baan Thai to have dinner with Yoshi, Mamiko and Akira, so that will be a lot of fun. I haven’t been to the restaurant in a long time, and I’m sure the spicy food will help clear out my system if I’m still feeling like crap.

This weekend should be fairly routine – I’ll be putting together the new exercise bike to be ready once I’m feeling better, and Kuniko has to work on Saturday but she’ll be off on Sunday. We’re probably going to just stay home and watch movies on Sunday to recharge the batteries for next week. I can’t believe it is almost July already…

So now I’m completely off the meds that my doctor gave me for my cold, and it seems that all I’m left with is a slightly sore throat. I’m drinking lots of water and my voice is holding up well. It should be no problem getting through the rest of this week.

Last night I made a big purchase – a new exercise bike to replace the one that I rode into disrepair previously. While looking through countless pages and stats on different exercise bikes I found an interesting stat about the old exercise bike I had. It said that the maximum continual exercise time was 30 minutes. That seems unreasonable to me – but maybe that is how it ended up being sent to the junk heap. Hopefully this new bike will be able to handle a longer exercise time. It should arrive sometime next week.

So since the middle of last week I’ve been fighting a cold, and thanks to my doctor I’ve got some medicine that is very effective. He gave me 6-7 kinds of medicine, and I take them after each meal. I’m not sure which one is working for me, but the sore throat and runny nose almost completely stop when I’m on them. On Saturday I figured I was home free on the weekend and I stopped taking them, but quickly the runny nose and cough showed up, so I’m back on the meds until I run out, which will be today.

The good news is that my voice is in pretty good shape, and I will be able to do classes this week.

On Friday we went out to dinner to try a new restaurant (for us) in Sannomiya. It was billed as a “French” restaurant, but what that usually translates to in English is “upscale Western food”. The good wasn’t bad. We had a nice vegetable salad with some unusual veggies, a pork and foie gras pate, and a leg of rabbit. Everything was tasty but not mind-blowing. There was no wine list, we just had to go with whatever the guy recommended, but the wines we ended up with were not bad at all. It was a little overpriced, though. so I don’t think we’ll head back there anytime soon.

Saturday we spent the whole day sleeping and watching movies, and enjoying Kuniko’s first day off in three weeks. She had to go in to take a test on Sunday, so I tried to rest up and get my condition back to a level where I could teach some classes.

This week will be a pretty normal week for both of us. I have a party with Antoine on Friday, so there is something to look forward to at the end of it. My class load is about normal, so hopefully my voice and my throat will be up to the task.

No blogging for a while, but I had lots of time today to write a little bit… thanks to being sick.

We had a really nice weekend and then I came back to work and suddenly, right around lunch time, I had a hint of a sore throat.  I went right away and gargled, but unfortunately it got progressively worse during my afternoon classes.  In my last class on Monday there was a little rasp to my voice during class.  Bad sign!

I went home and went to bed early (7 pm) and slept all the way through to the next morning, and I woke up feeling a little better but still with a sore throat.  I went ahead and went to work on Tuesday, and I got through the first class just fine, but then my voice just faded away gradually during the day.  By lunchtime I realized that there wasn’t going to be any voice at all soon enough, and I started to think up activities that would keep my students talking instead of me.  By the last student I couldn’t even say a word, so I was reduced to gestures and puberty squeaks.

So I made a judgement call and decided to take Wednesday off to try to not talk at all for the whole day, see a specialist,and try to get my voice back for the end of the week.

Today went just like that – I went to an ear/nose/throat specialist that Kuniko recommended, and I told him that I have an important presentation the next two days.  That spurred him to give me some serious drugs, and hopefully they are having an effect right now as I convalesce at home.  We’ll see how it goes tomorrow.

I’ve never had a cold come on so fast and strike right at my throat so quickly.  Hopefully it’ll leave just as fast…

We had a pretty uneventful weekend, with the exception of a trip into Osaka on Saturday evening. Since Kuniko was attending a conference there, I figured I’d go into town and look around a little before meeting her.

I bounced around the Umeda area checking various shops. Osaka has just about everything if you know where to look. I found my favorite brand of sriracha sauce, a replacement case for my cellphone, and I tried out a few exercise bikes in Yodobashi camera.

After looking around I went to the meetup point, the Umeda Sky Building, but I was still an hour early. I consulted an app on my phone and it pointed me to Craft Beer Base, a standing craft beer bar that had a lot of options. There weren’t many customers but I struck up a conversation with the bartender and one regular customer that works for Panasonic. I ate smoked kamaboko (yum!) and after a couple of beers it was perfect timing to get Kuniko.

From there we walked across Umeda to a Mexican restaurant I wanted to try called Herradura. It was much better than I expected. We really liked the green chili enchilada, the chicken fajitas were not bad, but unfortunately the carne asada was a little overcooked. We also had some chips and guacamole, but the amount of guacamole was really just a spoonful.

Overall the food was pretty good, but generally overpriced. It was nice to know that we could get some good enchiladas anytime, though.

We bought some tacos to go, and then did a little shopping at the station for avocados and cilantro, and then made our way home.

Sunday Kuniko was back to work and I did chores around the house, and also made a big batch of guacamole to make Kuniko feel better. When Kuniko got home we ate it for dinner along with some blended rum drinks, and her mood improved considerably. She’s got just five more work days to get through until her first day off this month. Piece of cake!

Everything fell together yesterday and I had a chance to sneak across town to check on the fireflies. At first I didn’t think I’d be able to do it, but as it turned out, it was a perfect time to go.

Kuniko had a party she was stuck attending, so I didn’t have to worry about cooking dinner. The weather report had said rain but it was clear with big black clouds far on the horizon. There was a fresh cool breeze blowing as well, so it was a very comfortable walk out to the park.

Once I arrived, it was just getting dark, and I needed my phone’s light to see down the pathway and avoid tripping and sliding down the hill. There were a couple of other people also arriving at that time, which I thought was a little unusual for a Thursday night. We quietly and separately waited a few minutes until the fireflies slowly emerged. There weren’t so many this time – I’d guess only five or six were floating along the pathway. Usually I go later in the year when there are more actively dancing around the stream. Last night some of the fireflies would pair up and chase each other around, and I wondered if it was a matter of battle or romance.

After spending about a half hour watching the firebugs I made my way back towards town, stopping to do some grocery shopping on the way home. I also stopped for a bowl of ramen, which is unusual for me. The place was called zundoya, which is a chain ramen restaurant. I really liked it, and the kaedama price was only one hundred yen, which I think is pretty reasonable. Not bad!

Today is Friday and I’m happy to be here. Tonight Kuniko should get off work a little earlier than normal so she’ll have a chance to rest up, and I’m not sure what we’ll do about dinner. Tomorrow we’ll both be in Osaka for different reasons, but we’ll try to meet up in the evening for dinner there. Maybe we can try a Mexican restaurant there and see if there are better options than we have in Kobe…

Although the rain has really yet to come in the rainy season, it is clearly going to happen any time now. The weather has been shifting between clouds and sun, and the humidity has been rising steadily. It is the time of year when carrying a hand towel everywhere is necessary.

We’ve been sticking with simple dinner salads each night, since Kuniko has been arriving late almost every day. I’m expecting this weekend to have a small chance of rain, so it might be my opportunity to do some grilling. Tonight there is a 50% chance of rain. If it looks like the rain will miss us, I might sneak out to see if I can see any fireflies at the nearby park. Apparently they don’t like to come out in the rain.

Last night I was hitting the exercise bike as usual. Five or six times a week I spend 45 minutes on the bike burning calories, and it has turned into one of my better habits for watching my weight.

However, all this riding had apparently taken a toll on the equipment, and suddenly the bike started making clanking noises. There were strange noises now and then over the past month, but this time it was serious. I pulled apart the box to see what was going on, and it is a complete mystery. The mechanism is some kind of magnet, a wheel, and a belt system. There is something wrong inside, but I have no idea what.

So I guess my $200 exercise bike is kaput after 10 months of riding. Kuniko is going to call the company and see if they have any big ideas, but I have a feeling that we’re out of luck with this particular model. I’ll start looking around for a replacement – maybe I can find something a little more durable.

Around here the humidity has really kicked in, and you can clearly see that the air conditioners are going to be needed soon. At work I’m using the office AC to keep the air dry and cool, but soon we’ll need to run them at home as well. Summer is definitely on the horizon.

At the end of last week, Kuniko’s dad got in what seemed to be a minor traffic accident. He was riding his scooter and was hit from the side by a car. He was knocked to the ground and hit his (helmeted) head, but luckily he was able to get up and walk away from the accident.

That night he complained of some serious headaches, so he ended up catching an ambulance ride to the hospital to see what was going on. It turned out to be a serious case of swelling of his brain, and so they went right to work on him. After some serious surgery he was out of danger, and now he’s resting up in the hospital taking it easy.

Most of this we heard after the fact. It all happened so quickly, there wasn’t much time to let people know. But we did get over to see him on Saturday, and he’s looking good. He had his head shaved and he looked like a military version of himself – I told him it was a good look for him. He was able to walk around and talk with everyone, so I suspect he’ll be out of the hospital soon. A doctor will consult with him today and make the final decision on how long he’ll need to stay in bed.

On Saturday we went over to see him in the hospital, and while we were driving there, we witnessed another scooter accident, with similar results. Scooters can be pretty dangerous I guess.

Anyway, Kuniko was working hard this weekend, so she didn’t have much relaxation time. Sunday night she came home around 5 pm, and we had grilled veggies and pork, along with a bottle of Spanish red. We watched a good movie, and then we headed off to bed. This morning it was tough for her to get going, though. She was wiped out and it is only Monday. Still two more weeks before she gets a day off.

Well, the rainy season blew in here with a vengeance this morning. I looked outside to see wind gusting the rain horizontally, and plenty of water everywhere. It started sometime overnight. I resigned myself to a soaking wet lower half, and possibly a broken umbrella.

Luckily Kuniko decided that she would rather drive through the rain than walk through it, so we had an uneventful trip to work. She has to work late tonight, so I’m on my own for getting back home. I think the weather should be better by then, though.

Yesterday I had a relatively light workday with a couple of empty class slots to work on other projects. Recently this is a very rare occurrence. As if to make up for it, I’ve got nine classes today and tomorrow, so I’ll be plenty busy.

I think I’m finally getting the knack of cooking Southeast Asian dishes. After my success with dim sum last weekend, I thought I’d have a go at the leftovers last night, and came up with a Thai stir fry that I liked a lot. It was just shrimp, carrots, mushrooms, onion and leeks, and cilantro, but it turned out better than I expected.

June will be a very busy month for Kuniko. She’ll have only one day off this month, so I think I’ll have a lot of opportunities to do some cooking. With the temperature rising and the rainy season rolling around any day now, I’ll have to think of some non-BBQ dishes to prepare.

On Saturday I bought a bunch of ingredients and made my own dim sum dishes for the first time ever. I’ve made gyoza plenty of times, but perhaps I was inspired by our trip to Taiwan, so I wanted to branch out and try some new things.

I made two kinds of basic fillings, one that based on ground pork with chopped shrimp, Chinese chives, garlic, sesame oil, sugar and chili peppers. The other filling was a vegetarian one with maitake mushrooms, carrots, tofu, chopped leeks, with lots of spices and a little corn starch to hold it together.

I spent the afternoon wrapping them up, making dumplings and shumai, as well as bigger ravioli versions that were delicious but didn’t have the right balance of wrapper and filling for me.

So Saturday night was a big dim sum night and we enjoyed a movie and relaxation, which kind of carried over into Sunday as well.

The temperature has been heating up quite a bit lately, and we’ve started to consider the air conditioner as an option. I imagine that we’ll be using it by the end of the week if it stays like this. Any day now the rainy season will start up, and then we’ll mainly need it for drying out the rooms.

This week is a pretty normal week, which is nice considering how busy I’ve been recently. I’m hoping that things go smoothly today and that nothing unusual comes up.

Today is the last class for our new employees. The last two days we’ve been working on various basic English tasks – using the telephone, making appointments, describing products. Our plan today is to move to making a basic English presentation. It is a variation of another activity I usually do with small groups later in the year.

Since I’ve been spending so much time focusing on these intensive lessons, I’ve had less time to do other stuff. Once I wrap up today’s lesson, I’ll be able to get to other items on my todo list.

Last night Kuniko had a baking lesson after work, and she brought home some delicious “red wine” bread, that was stuffed with dried cranberries and cream cheese. Wow – it was really good. We’ll be able to enjoy it for the next few breakfasts. Usually Kuniko doesn’t have time to bake at home, and next month will be especially busy for her. The nice thing about the lessons is that the baking time is a reserved appointment, and she can’t easily put it off until later.

In Japan they are proposing a new holiday, called Mountain Day that would happen in August. On the surface, it seems like Japan already has plenty of holidays. According to the news Japan has the largest number of public holidays of any of the industrialized nations, and so you’d think that everyone is just relaxing and enjoying them.

In fact, the pressure on workers (from their coworkers, bosses, neighbors, and family) to NOT take a paid day off is very intense. If someone takes a day off for themselves during the middle of the week, they will be worried about the troubles they have caused all their coworkers and customers, and nobody is having a good time. The solution is to make a national holiday that everyone is taking off – that way it is “fair” and everyone can get some rest.

Lots of cultural mysteries here for someone like me. Luckily my holidays (at least so far) have little effect on my coworkers and I can usually take them as I see fit. We’ll see if I still have a job next year, though…

Friday night after work we met up in Akashi with great anticipation, and then walked over to Ciro for dinner. It has been quite a while since we’ve been, and we were looking forward to dinner all week.

The staff recognized us right away and gave us the best table in the restaurant – with a nice view of the Akashi bridge and a pleasant breeze blowing through the windows. It was a lot like eating outdoors.

As usual the antipasti was excellent, and I was able to pick out a nice wine from the list to enjoy. Unfortunately the pizza was a little disappointing. It was a mozzarella, basil and porcini mushroom pizza, but there were just two or three leaves of basil on it, and the porcini were inexplicably distributed so that 40% of the pizza had no toppings. We did some rearrangement of the toppings, but it was odd that we had to. On the menu it used to say “buffalo mozzarella” for the pizzas, but this time I noticed it only said “mozzarella”, so maybe they are cutting costs? We weren’t thrilled with the pasta selection either – only tomato sauce pastas were on the menu, no pesto and no cream sauces.

We did order some shrimp and lobster, and they did a great job cooking those up for us.

And to top it all off, our “connection” wasn’t working there, and we found out from another staff that he moved to Osaka. Too bad – he was a really nice guy.

So this was a bummer for us – Ciro used to be our “go-to” restaurant if we wanted a guaranteed special meal. We’ll try them again after a while but if it is a repeat performance of this weekend, we’ll be on the hunt for somewhere new.

Saturday we went into Osaka to attend a beer festival at the invitation of Yoshi and Mamiko. The meeting time was at 1:30 pm, so we went out to Osaka a little bit early and played tourist around Namba. Kuniko and I almost never go to Osaka, and I couldn’t remember the last time we had been there together. We walked through the tourist dotombori on the river and enjoyed some street food and beer while taking in the sights. It was an odd feeling – it seemed like we were visiting a different country, and I really got the feeling like I was seeing Japan again for the first time. Kuniko and I agreed later that we’ll try to get into Osaka more often, and that might end up being a resolution to our problem with Ciro.

We met up with Yoshi and Mamiko and walked through the beer festival. The focus of the festival was the craft beers of Japan (especially Kansai) and so there were lots of good beers to try. Some were great, some not so good, and some bordering on outlandish (soba beer?) but it was fun to try everything. For 2000 yen we got tickets for six beers, so the price was very reasonable. We brought lots of snacks, and they had some good food on sale, and I even bumped into one of my former students from KHI. Good times.

We did a little wine shopping on the way home, and then just ate a salad for dinner. We were tired from being out in the sun all day drinking beers, so Saturday night and Sunday were pretty much just relaxation time.

We’re all geared up and ready for a busy week at work. I’ve got some intensive classes Monday through Wednesday, and a special lesson to plan for next week. It is a busy time for both of us, so I’m sure we’ll be looking to the weekend soon.