After a restless night with stomach aches and medicine in the middle of the night, Maylin wakes us all up at 5.45am by being sick. Upstairs, on the tatami mats. Tatami mats are tightly woven bamboo strands that hold on to liquids and smells. You can imagine the rest.
At 6.45am, I’m on my way to the laundromat with the linens and the duvet. The Family Mart across the street provides both breakfast and coins for the machines. Meanwhile at home, Maylin is still sick.
At 8.15am I get home, and Joe heads to the grocery store for additional cleaning supplies when they open at 9am. By 10am, we have done what we feel we can, and all the upstairs windows are open. Maylin is feeling much better, so much so she thinks she’s coming with Téa and I to the city centre, which she is not.
Téa and I head towards Umeda station, with the goal of the bookstore and lunch. We arrive to the bustling shopping district, even more busy on a Saturday morning than any weekday afternoon rush hour. Everyone is out and about, and they are here to shop and browse and enjoy, not speedwalk to their next train.
Téa is craving pizza, and I am not one to turn away crispy thin crust and delicious melty cheese. We aim for a pizza place on the umpteenth floor of a building we haven’t tried out yet, but as we come off the escalators, the first Italian place we see has about 30 plastic examples of pasta in a large display case facing us. I point to one, saying “I could eat that”, and suddenly Téa wanted pasta! Also, I think she smelled the garlic bread that was being carried out of the kitchens just as we walked by…
This restaurant serves their pasta in portions of 300g, or you can get a smaller portion of only 220g and get a discount, or increase to a large or extra large portion for an additional fee. Téa and I chose a lunch time sampler instead, with half a portion of two different pastas, to which we added garlic toast and meat sauce fries. We were so happy with our flavours and portion sizes, an absolutely perfect mother daughter lunch!
This mall was half electronics store, half department store, and it gets really confusing. On one side of the building, you are perpetually trapped in a loud electronics store (they have ads playing automatically at so many displays), and on the opposite end, you have regular shops. We try and sometimes fail to find a way out of these ones…
But we did find a Lego banana photo op:
We took our time browsing the stationary section, without a Joe and a Maylin tugging at our sleves and asking us if we’re done soon. We picked up a bunch of fun pencils, erasers and other stuff the girls will use, as well as a couple of gifts. We then walked over towards the book store, and had to stop when we found a mochi stall selling large lumps of chewy sweet deliciousness for $1CA each.
Oh gosh I love this bookstore… Fair enough, it’s cramped and confusing, it has maybe 4 or 5 entrances, and we always seem to arrive through a differnet one than last time, but once we find our Foreign Languages corner, it’s always a hit. I took a good long browse at the books about Japan and by Japanese authors section today, looking the books up on my Libby app so I can hopefully listen to some, as I rarely find time to sit down with a book, even now on a year away. There is always so many things to do! But I can always pop an audiobook into my ear while doing dishes, getting groceries or sitting at the laundromat.
Téa ended up finding two new books, and we now have lots of books to offload before we leave Osaka in less than 5 weeks. We’re also trying out reading books on the phone, but there’s something special about turning pages in a real book, and I love seeing her on the couch, completely engulfed in her story, just like her mom used to do, many moons ago…
We needed to pick up a couple of things at Daiso, the amazing dollarstore that truly has everything, so we had to make our way through the station network of undergrown passageways. Of course there was a keychain vending machine somewhere in there!
We found the Daiso and one of two things we were hunting for. What we did NOT buy today could fill another 10 pages of blog, but this one in particular caught my eye:
We made it home around 5pm, it was a long but good day, and Joe made congee for dinner. Maylin was feeling so much better, and we watched the first half of Howl’s Moving Castle before we all went to bed early.