January 24

Today was Osu!!!! I had a lot of fun with Kili and Anna, but we weren’t able to find Mike. I started the day with scrambled eggs (made by me!), toast, tomatoes, and juice. While I was making the eggs, okaasan opened the kitchen floorboards to reveal; a freezer!!! I thought that was the coolest thing ever. I told her we didn’t have that in America and she said it was very convenient to have it.

I don’t know what was up, but I was really clumsy today and at breakfast alone, I dropped my toast and a tomato. Afterward, I rushed off to the eki to meet Kili. She was ten minutes late, but it worked out really well, as that was about the time the train arrived. We rode to Yagoto to meet up with Anna, and it was very close to 9:30 (when we planned to meet) when we got off the train and called her. I guess the day was starting too well, and when we got to Osu (at about 10:00 as we planned), Mike wasn’t there. We waited until about 10:10 for him, but he didn’t show, and having no (functional) cellphone, we could not call him.

Osu was a lot of fun. When we got started, many of the stores were not open yet and the place was quite empty (even though it was after 10:00). We spent a lot of time looking at clothes (the coolest of which were made for guys or too small for me), shoes, toys, and people. We went into an arcade and did the fancy photo booth thing where you take pictures with really bright lights and then superimpose cute images on the photos. It was a lot of fun, but the pictures came out really small.

Around (inside and out of) Osu are a lot of jinja. It was very strange to see all the modern fashions so close to the traditional structures. When I went to Osu, I was expecting to find many things I liked and wanted to buy, even go relatively broke. I did find a scarf that looks like a cat pelt (complete with head, legs, and tail) that I’m still kind of considering and a fancy (overpriced) mini top-hat. However, I ended up buying one capsule toy and a couple of snacks. When we were in osu, it started snowing on and off. It was strange snow; not flakes, but pellets. It was really pretty, however. It was after it started snowing when I bought my capsule toy, and coincidentally, it was a teru teru bouzu for snow (there were different ones for rain, wind, sun, etc.). I was very happy with it, as it was my favorite of the ones I could have gotten.

Afterward, I bought a nikuman (delicious!) and another snack I couldn’t identify. It was like a spherical corn-dog, but instead of a hotdog, it had sweet bean paste inside. Soon after, we headed back to the station, but I was still hungry, so we stopped by the seven-11 to pick something up. They had the chocolate sandwich (squishy bread with chocolate syrup/icing inside) I had been wanting to try, but couldn’t find recently in Lawsons. It was pretty good, but I would have preferred another bean paste donut.

The trip home was rather uneventful and I used the computer until dinner. Okaasan made a delicious meal of grilled steak (yes, steak!!!), broccoli, potato, dumplings (I can never remember the Japanese word for it), and yellow peppers. We also had Japanese eggplant (I wish I had room to eat more), gohan (never old), and miso. Of course, I had to embarrass myself again by dropping a piece of potato and almost knocking over the hashi for the eggplant. I don’t know what was up with my coordination today. After dinner, Otousan told me about alcohols in different countries and which kinds went with which types of food. According to him, most alcohol doesn’t go with Japanese food because Japanese food has very mild taste. I also learned that he considered a dutch oven a man’s cooking piece (cowboys’ to be precise) and was surprised to hear my mother in the US is the one who uses our oven.