relaxing Saturday
Oct. 13th, 2012 11:54 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jinianToday's mystery onigiri contained asari shigure, which seems to be basically clam teriyaki. Delicious! Very much like beef, actually.
Drying my clothes on the balcony today, in a very location-appropriate manner, since despite my throwing 200 yen at the dryer last night it did a terrible job. I strewed socks over everything non-porous in my tiny room and they all dried okay overnight, but the jeans and most of the t-shirts had to wait. It's clear and fall-like today, cool except in the warm sun, so things are drying well.
I had a long walk this morning since I didn't want anything in the house for breakfast, and ascertained that, yep, most grocery stores aren't open before 8. Even the bakeries were shut. (Wim, your Lazy Baker shop would be no novelty here.) By the time I'd walked past the supermarket on the main road heading west, then down past Irinaka Station, I'd remembered that Aeon is open early, so I headed there. On the way, I passed a lovely little pond park and the largest concentration of people I saw, which was at the temple in Koushouji Park. Apparently old people are the only ones who go out in the morning, and what they do is go to the temple.
I successfully shopped at Aeon, though I chose not to buy the only cookie sheet I've seen in Japan, as it was about $15. There's a little pastry shop inside that was actually open, and I got a cinnamon twist (which proved to be a bit tough) and a mysterious, highly squishy apple-cheese-Danish bun thing. They also had flowers, and I'm really missing my garden, so I bought gentians, this glorious deep blue. Currently they're arranged in a PET bottle in the kitchen, which doesn't really suit their dignity, but oh well.
Walking back I passed yet another university (Chukyo, added to Nagoya Daigaku where I'm enrolled and Nanzan which I pass on my way home from ND) and a Toys R Us. Check this out:
![[Apparently Geoffrey was sufficiently cute to keep as mascot. Yes, I know his name.]](https://p2.dreamwidth.org/e25fc0fe7539/678086-531062/underhill.hhhh.org/~igg/2012-10-13_toysrus.jpg)
That's "to i za RA su" -- most of it is in katakana, the usual syllabary for foreign words, but that RA is in hiragana. I bet little kids mix up their syllabaries all the time, which means this is the translated version of the backwards R. I know some of us love orthography so must despise the backwards R in its native context, but look how it is translated.
Also they have the best morning-glories here. Little kids grow them as experiments in school, I know, but these beautiful ones are clearly the product of extensive breeding. The ones on the left don't even have the right number of petals. (Easy to tell because of the stripes; this family normally has five petals and the development doesn't change so easily even when the petals are fused together.) I've always loved these, but they're so invasive in the Pacific Northwest that I was never, never allowed to plant any.
![[Velvety and deep-colored in pinks and blues]](https://p2.dreamwidth.org/2d48ee82136d/678086-531062/underhill.hhhh.org/~igg/2012-10-13-mg-all.jpg)
Drying my clothes on the balcony today, in a very location-appropriate manner, since despite my throwing 200 yen at the dryer last night it did a terrible job. I strewed socks over everything non-porous in my tiny room and they all dried okay overnight, but the jeans and most of the t-shirts had to wait. It's clear and fall-like today, cool except in the warm sun, so things are drying well.
I had a long walk this morning since I didn't want anything in the house for breakfast, and ascertained that, yep, most grocery stores aren't open before 8. Even the bakeries were shut. (Wim, your Lazy Baker shop would be no novelty here.) By the time I'd walked past the supermarket on the main road heading west, then down past Irinaka Station, I'd remembered that Aeon is open early, so I headed there. On the way, I passed a lovely little pond park and the largest concentration of people I saw, which was at the temple in Koushouji Park. Apparently old people are the only ones who go out in the morning, and what they do is go to the temple.
I successfully shopped at Aeon, though I chose not to buy the only cookie sheet I've seen in Japan, as it was about $15. There's a little pastry shop inside that was actually open, and I got a cinnamon twist (which proved to be a bit tough) and a mysterious, highly squishy apple-cheese-Danish bun thing. They also had flowers, and I'm really missing my garden, so I bought gentians, this glorious deep blue. Currently they're arranged in a PET bottle in the kitchen, which doesn't really suit their dignity, but oh well.
Walking back I passed yet another university (Chukyo, added to Nagoya Daigaku where I'm enrolled and Nanzan which I pass on my way home from ND) and a Toys R Us. Check this out:
That's "to i za RA su" -- most of it is in katakana, the usual syllabary for foreign words, but that RA is in hiragana. I bet little kids mix up their syllabaries all the time, which means this is the translated version of the backwards R. I know some of us love orthography so must despise the backwards R in its native context, but look how it is translated.
Also they have the best morning-glories here. Little kids grow them as experiments in school, I know, but these beautiful ones are clearly the product of extensive breeding. The ones on the left don't even have the right number of petals. (Easy to tell because of the stripes; this family normally has five petals and the development doesn't change so easily even when the petals are fused together.) I've always loved these, but they're so invasive in the Pacific Northwest that I was never, never allowed to plant any.
