Thursday is science day in the school of Cheng! Both girls had fun working on renewable and non-renewable resources, and reuse, reduce, recycle. When school was done, Maylin went to “Téa’s daycare” for a bit, while we waited for Kristian to come over.
When Kristian got here, we headed downtown together. I had selected a building at Umeda where the restaurant floor had a great selection of cuisines, so that’s where we headed. We took the escalators from the 1st to the 12th floor, as elevators are generally reserved for customers with mobility issues of various kinds (like strollers). Once at the right floor, of course we turned left instead of right, so we almost thought I’d gotten it wrong, but we found the restaurant, and put our names down.
It seemed like an absolute eternity and turned into a later lunch than originally planned, but this katsu don restaurant knew their stuff! Both girls ordered the easy-to-like kids’ set, which included an “octopus” out of hot dog, a small hamburg with gravy, a fried shrimp, a smiley face fried potato, potato salad, cabbage salad, rice, dessert and a juice. Not bad for $9CA!
At this point I’ve forgotten that I’ll be writing a blog post about lunch, and I stop taking pictures. Or maybe I was too hungry, the kids sets came out well in advance of the rest of the food, so both girls were about half way through their meal before the rest of us could dig in. So yeah, it was probably hunger that did it.
Kristian and I both had a set meal which included a fried shrimp croquette, a ground beef croquette, and a small fried pork round, as well as a small dessert. Joe had the fried pork cutlet and a ground beef croquette stuffed with cheese. Meals at katsu don restaurants come with unlimited rice, shredded cabbage, pickles and miso soup, and of course cold tea. It was a very tasty meal, and our last with Kristian before he flies home tonight, and I have zero pictures to show for it!
After lunch, we had a lot of floors to travel through on our way back down, with lots of time for browsing. Usually these floors are packed full of stores, and each escalator ends up in the same store layout as the last, just with different goods. But here! Suddenly, everything opened up, and it was a grand open space! You don’t often find “wasted real estate” in Japan, each square foot is well planned and efficiently used. I have to say, what a sight, what a refreshing space! Today it’s an art gallery, but with the space for an audience, it may at other times hold performances of some kind?
Right behind the stuffy zoo, we found Itoya! If you have been reading my blog since the start, you’ll recognize the name as the amazing 12 floor stationary store in the Ginza district of Tokyo. Here, it’s wide spread with lots of fancy pen display cases in the middle, with the cutesy washi tape, cards and stickers relegated to the surrounding wall space.
We continued down the escalators and suddenly saw an aquarium we needed to take a closer look at. This lead us to an amazing store focusing on indoor wet gardens, where Japanese hobby gardeners don’t need any outdoor space or big trees in small pots to create landscaping art. The below creation had cold fog seeping out from above and creating quite the magical and serene environment to look at. I could totally see myself having one of these things – if I can get Joe to care for it. I have zero green thumbs, and it would quickly die in my care.
We decided to head down to the basement, Kristian had extra space in his luggage so I could send a little something for him and his family to enjoy. I couldn’t find the Japanese maple treats I was thinking of, but was able to send a tower of baumkuchen with him. We also wanted to stomp on some Scandinavian history and devour some Danish Hearts, so we bought a cup of teeny tiny dense cake hearts and pretended to extract revenge on old enemies. They were delicious, and I will gladly do that again!
This is where Kristian left us to travel all the way back home, and again I didn’t even take a single picture. We had just discovered that the girls’ bouldering class was starting in less than an hour, we had 30 minutes of travel ahead of us, and we still needed to get them a snack, considering it was getting late and they were about to go exercise for an hour!
We stopped at a convenience store at the subway station to grab a juice and a snack for the girls. We made it to bouldering on time, where they hung out in the climbing wall, quite literally, and played bean bag games with the instructor and fellow climbers.
After bouldering we just needed something small to snack on, as we didn’t really have a dinner today, so we each picked a snack at a Family Mart at the subway station. Joe and I had onigiri, rice triangles, and the girls picked a hash brown and a fried chicken. We ate standing in the middle of the station, as it’s frowned upon to eat while walking in Japan, and a definite no-no to eat or drink on public transit. We also tried out one of the hot teas in a bottle from the heating shelf! The one I grabbed was too sweet for my liking, and it was very strange to drink a hot beverage from a plastic bottle, so much of it did not make sense at all.
We bussed it home and stopped by the grocery store to pick up some breakfast items for tomorrow. Because it was after 7pm, all ready made food was discounted, as its short expiry date ensures your food is always fresh. Here’s some of what we picked up:
