Aaaaaaaaaand exhale… Woke up to freezing 13 degrees and rain, and after the intense day (and 22,300 steps) we had yesterday, we decided to take it easy today. So I have no news for you, no pictures, end of story, I’ll be back tomorrow.
Ha ha ha, you didn’t actually believe that, did you? Well, the first part is true, but I can talk until the cows come home, and I took some pictures just to show you what a mundane day in Osaka looks like for the Cheng family.
The girls started off with English class, Téa worked on direct and indirect objects, Maylin was evaluating a presentation, and then made a video of her own.
At yesterday’s lunch, Maylin’s meal included some Minion cookies that she stuck in her bag for later, so for after school and before shower snack time, the girls had some fruits and split the cookies between themselves. Maylin wanted to show me she could do the same pose as the Minion on her cookie:
While Téa’s Minion was Bob, who has a teddy bear, Tim, just like Téa has Teddy! So of course Teddy had to be in the picture as well:
We ate ChikinRamen for lunch! Not the actual noodles that we made from scratch at the museum on Monday, but the packs that they gave us in addition to our creations. With Chicken Ramen, the flavouring is added between the steaming step and the frying step in the process of making the ramen ready for the shelves, so it’s the easiest ramen to make. Boil water, add noodles, done. No flavour packet, no garnish packet, no oil packet, just flavoured noodles! Delicious, but the girls somehow now just want to eat them crunchy, like when they placed the crumbs in our hand right after the frying and cooling down process was over. Ah, the memories!
After lunch, I grabbed all our dryer-friendly laundry and headed to the laundromat. I have no pictures of the laundromat. I stuck the load in the washing machine, waited 39 minutes, then moved it to the dryer, and then ran the dryer three times (it runs for 12 minutes every time you put a ¥100 coin in). BUT I did go to the Family Mart up the street, I wanted an iced coffee, and reached for one of the bottles on the top row. Where did I go wrong?
When I touched the Craft Boss Latte on the top row, it was hot to the touch! Oh no, let me get a staff member, something must be wrong with this fridge!! Oooooooor maybe I can’t read. This is not a fridge, it is a warming display. All the drinks are hot, they are labelled “Hot”, the shelves are labelled “Hot”. I just wasn’t looking. I wasn’t thinking. I had my Western thinking cap on, not my Japanese one. So yes, you can buy hot tea and hot coffee and hot lemon honey tea, all in plastic bottles, all kept hot “forever” on a shelf in a store. Maybe their plastic is different here? Is it safe? Will the hot little can top left in the picture burn my lips? Maybe I will have to test that out on a different boring day, and blog about it? Hope I won’t have burnt lips in the pictures from that day!
When I got home with clean, dry and folded laundry, I made the girls pause their game that Joe had JUST let them start, so they could help me sort and put away the laundry. I had another pressing task, and needed to get going!
Once laundry was put away, I was out the door again, this time headed to the grocery store. For a day when I could have sat on the kitchen chair all day, I wanted to get out and walk the few minutes in each direction for these two simple tasks, at least.
The grocery store was so quiet, the bike parking out front less than half full, which I have never seen before. Is it the drizzle? The promised downpour that isn’t here yet? I don’t know.
I picked veggies and salmon for dinner, and approached a fellow shopper in the cleaning isle to point to my screenshot of the translated word for “dish washing liquid”. She pointed to the two correct rows (some of the bottles above and below look just the same, but of course different characters), turned around and saw my face, then pointed to one bottle in particular. I must have looked overwhelmed or confused, whatever the look I gave, I now have a new dish washing liquid! (My internet cuts out inside this store, which is highly frustrating, but with planning, everything works!)
Once the necessities were covered, then I picked up some new and exciting stuff:
I picked this pack up with a bag of 6 skinny and crunchy cucumbers. The snap and crunch biting into a Japanese cucumber cannot be compared to the Canadian “English” cucumbers, and I look forward to trying this seasoning, which needs to sit for minimum 30 minutes, preferably overnight.
I bought this package of prawn cracker, rice crackers, baked peanuts and fried anchovies for something different. This is a popular bar snack to have with a frosty beer, or so I hear, I still don’t like beer. Will I ever, at this point? This package contains 5 smaller bags, so I thought we’d open one to taste, to see if the girls would like it. Joe opened one bag and handed the little anchovy to Maylin, and it was gone. Yum, she said. He gave one to Téa, and she did that nervous half giggle half cry, why do I have to, take it away, kind of reaction. Maylin tried one of the baked peanut balls and called it spicy, but everything else was delicious. Téa eventually tried the fish! She said it tasted like fish and bones, but of course it was just a dried and fried little salty thing, it’s too tiny to even notice anything else. But she tried it, which is a victory in itself! That one bag became two bags, became three bags, became four. We have one tiny bag out of the five left. We were hunting for anchovies, as there were 1-3 fish in each bag, and of course everything else was also devoured along the way…
I was looking for a new dessert, and I knew the family would expect chocolate, so I hit them with my new favourite:
Unfortunately, the sweet potato was too thin to compete with the dough twist, so this one was a disappointment. Liked, but not loved, by all involved.
This last item was not new, and not exciting, “just” a necessity. I ran out of green tea a few days back, and my days have not been the same since. The package on the left was purchased one of the first days in Tokyo, and I thought for sure I would go through the 100 tea bags fast, but it’s still here, and there’s still maybe 30 left? The pack on the right is Hojicha, one of my new favourite teas, which is a roasted green tea. The good thing is, I just keep topping my cup up with hot water, and it keeps on giving. The first cup is too strong, and I usually keep on filling up beyond the last traces of flavour, but it’s the scent that keeps me happy. I could drink this all day. The puny Lipton tea bags just simply do not cut it any more.
So there you go, my day in brief. Tomorrow will have more. More action, more pictures, more food, more fun. But maybe not as much as yesterday. And we have to say goodbye to Kristian tomorrow, it’s been a quick week! At least we get to see him one more time before he flies home.