Since I hadn’t had much of a chance to spend time with Kuniko over the last week or so, she invited me to join her on a tour of the Amagasaki-Nishinomiya-Itami area to root on her tennis club students. <\/p>\n
I kept Kuniko company on the drive there, and while she went into the tennis matches to talk to her students I stayed out in the car and studied and read books. I stayed on my own partly because I was looking for some time to study and partly because of decorum – I didn’t want to create a distraction for Kuniko while she did her job. <\/p>\n
The first school was actually pretty close to Hamawaki Junior High in Nishinomiya, so we drove by the place where I used to commute to every day. Definitely \u00e6\u2021\u0090\u00e3\u0081\u2039\u00e3\u0081\u2014\u00e3\u0081\u201e. It took a long time for the tennis games to wrap up, and then we moved on to two other schools. At the last school we gave two giggling students a ride to their train station, and then we were free.<\/p>\n
Since we were near Itami we stopped at Diamond City, a place we had been one time before. It’s kind of similar to an American mall, but all the shops are Japanese. We did find a Hawaiian fast food restaurant in the food court, but we were kind of between meals so we didn’t get anything. I’ll just have to wait until summer.<\/p>\n
The last stop was a great one. In Amagasaki there is the last Carrefour in Japan. When Carrefour pulled out of Japan they sold their stores to a big Japanese supermarket company. That company, called Aeon, kept the Carrefour in Futami alive for a while but finally pulled the plug. Apparently this one in Amagasaki is still doing great. It was packed when we were there, and they had all our old favorites. I bought a six pack of Negra Modelo, we got lots of tortillas, a bottle of wine, Cholula hot sauce, and loads of cheese. We went hog wild in Carrefour, and after leaving I think maybe it is sort of a good thing that there isn’t one quite so close anymore.<\/p>\n
By the time we got home we were pretty beat, but we persevered and went to catch a late show of Spiderman 3. The place was packed! I’m not sure why Spiderman is so popular in Asia. My review of the movie: not so great. Too Hollywood, I’d say.<\/p>\n
We crashed out hard after that – so exhausted. Luckily there is nothing on the agenda for Sunday, so we can rest up.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Since I hadn’t had much of a chance to spend time with Kuniko over the last week or so, she invited me to join her on a tour of the Amagasaki-Nishinomiya-Itami area to root on her tennis club students. I kept Kuniko company on the drive there, and while she went into the tennis matches […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1295","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pOpl7-kT","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1295","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1295"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1295\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1295"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1295"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1295"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}