{"id":454,"date":"2004-08-23T13:10:00","date_gmt":"2004-08-23T13:10:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/?p=454"},"modified":"2004-08-23T13:10:00","modified_gmt":"2004-08-23T13:10:00","slug":"first-departure-from-nishi-futami-lunch-with-the-ladies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/?p=454","title":{"rendered":"First Departure From Nishi-Futami, Lunch With The Ladies"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This morning I had the pleasure of walking just a short distance to the new train station and catching a nice easy ride into work.  Once I arrived at work I was able to study for about half and hour, and the rest of the time I chatted with various people and relaxed.  I&#8217;m just now starting to think about my first lessons &#8211; hmm&#8230; what should I do?<\/p>\n<p>At around noon I went outside and met up with Keiko-san, one of the locals that organizes an English conversation every now and again.  I was surprised this time to find that we had lots more participants&#8230; three more folks came by.  I had my hands full keeping everyone in the conversation, but it worked out well.  They paid for my lunch, and we even had a Japanese conversation to help with my learning curve.  They are a good group of people, and it&#8217;s fun to chat with them.  They are remarkably frank about some issues, and it&#8217;s interesting to get their take on things with the safety off.<\/p>\n<p>I spent almost three hours chatting and eating with them, and then I headed home to change and get ready for my Japanese class in Kobe.  The class went pretty well, although there was one concept that I kept getting confused on.  The South American guy in the class was heckling me in Spanish while I was trying to make a sentence in Japanese &#8211; pretty confusing.  At the end the teacher had trouble with a concept, and I think we all ended the class totally confused.  I hope that they can pick up the pieces on Friday night.  This was one class that did more harm than good.<\/p>\n<p>Usually I stop in at a ramen place that has free kimchee on my way home, but this time I thought I&#8217;d try a new restaurant.  The place had some delicious looking plastic food in their window, so I went inside and ordered up.   The dish was strips of steak, noodles, rice, corn, a soft boiled egg, and bits of garlic all mixed up in a sauce and served in a hot clay pot.  It looked great, but it turned out the sauce was almost completely oil.  It was damn near the greasiest thing I&#8217;ve ever eaten, anywhere.  I ate about half and left the rest to coagulate.<\/p>\n<p>Now I&#8217;m back home &#8211; the weather is starting to pick up and there&#8217;s talk of another typhoon approaching tonight and tomorrow.  Hopefully it will blow itself out tonight and tomorrow will be a dry day.  <\/p>\n<p>Oh, almost forgot, they&#8217;re putting in signs in the food court at Ito Yokado and I identified another place &#8211; Baskin Robbins 31 Flavors.  I&#8217;ve got my fingers crossed for a coffee shop in there somewhere.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This morning I had the pleasure of walking just a short distance to the new train station and catching a nice easy ride into work. Once I arrived at work I was able to study for about half and hour, and the rest of the time I chatted with various people and relaxed. I&#8217;m just [&hellip;]<\/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-454","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\/pOpl7-7k","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/454","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=454"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/454\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=454"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=454"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=454"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}