On Saturday I decided to make the trek out to Futami to walk around town and see what is new and what is the same. Turns out, most of it hasn’t changed much. <\/p>\n
I started off taking the Sanyo Railway from Nakayagi station in the south part of Okubo, and it was a 15 minute ride to Higashi Futami station. The station looked the same, but the surrounding buildings seemed to have changed quite a bit. The area was pretty run down the last time I was there, but it seemed like things were improving a bit.<\/p>\n
Then I continued on the local train to Nishi Futami station, and walked right into Ito Yokado. A few stores had changed, but really it was just about exactly how I remembered it. I walked through the supermarket, and it was surprising to see the selection. I remembered when Ito Yokado first opened and I walked through the supermarket thinking that I had died and gone to heaven. Up until Ito Yokado came, I was limited to a few basic groceries at a local supermarket, or a long trek north to Carrefour. <\/p>\n
Now walking through the supermarket I felt like it didn’t have much compared to what we have access to in Okubo. No imported food store, no wine selection, no craft beer aisle. Sometimes I forget how good we have it.<\/p>\n
After a thorough patrol of IY I walked outside and followed my old footpath back to my first home in Japan, the teacher apartments next door. They looked just as old and depressing as I remember, and it looked like my old place was occupied. I didn’t hang out too long, though, and headed down the street to visit the Denya yakitori.<\/p>\n
At the yakitori I was the only customer, but I did arrive a bit on the early side. The master was surprised and seemed happy to see me, and we talked about his new situation. He got re-married in March, and his new wife has a junior high school age son from a previous marriage, which makes the master a step father. Also, his wife is pregnant and is due later this year, so he has a son on the way as well. He’s a busy guy!<\/p>\n
He called some of the Denya regulars and three of the old gang showed up to drink and talk with me. It was a lot of fun to catch up with them, and we spent an hour or so eating, drinking and talking about old times. They gave me a lift back to Tsuchiyama station, so it worked out pretty well for me. <\/p>\n
The rest of the weekend was spent in our usual pattern – resting up at home watching movies. It was a rainy, muggy day outside, so it was perfect for us to relax indoors. We didn’t even go shopping – instead drawing from our pantry stores. Kuniko even squeezed in a nap.<\/p>\n
This week I have a pretty standard schedule, but I’m looking forward to the end of the week because I’ll kick off nine days off in a row. It should be rainy on and off this week but Kuniko said she’s driving to work every day, so I should be sheltered from some of the rain. Sounds like an easy week!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
On Saturday I decided to make the trek out to Futami to walk around town and see what is new and what is the same. Turns out, most of it hasn’t changed much. I started off taking the Sanyo Railway from Nakayagi station in the south part of Okubo, and it was a 15 minute […]<\/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":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2866","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-Ke","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2866","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=2866"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2866\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2866"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2866"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2866"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}