second weekend and American wine

So instead of giving you the weekend play by play, how about some nice photos and a listing of some of the (fun) things that I did??

Went to the grocery store and bought too much to carry home on my bicycle.  Well, I managed to carry it all home but my purse was slam full, my basket was overfull and I had a bag hanging from my handlbars.  Not good when I'm already wobbly on the bicycle.

Please notice the extra carefully packaged apples.  Welcome to Japan.  Welcome to the $2 perfect apple.

I forgot to mention that on Friday night, my colleague asked if I could "teach" them Halloween.  Of course I'm happy to teach on such a fun subject so naturally I ventured to the baking supplies aisle to try and find ingredients for pumpkin cookies... or something like that.  Well this is about as far as I got.  I'll definitely need an interpreter for figuring out which is flour and which is powdered sugar, etc.  Could end up with some really nasty cookies if I do it on my own.

Baking powder?  Maybe??

Thank you, Franzia, for representing the top notch wine that America has to offer so well.  Classy.

My Grandma used to drink Franzia white zinfandel out of a refrigerated box.  And she was one classy lady.  

This is the bottle I bought.  Not the Franzia, unfortunately.  Sarah D, didn't we drink this in Greensboro on our wine bar date??  

Mushrooms in a curry gravy for breakfast.  I think this was taken before I went to the grocery store.  

A little mid-afternoon walking.  Full park tour coming in another post.  

Killed a mosquito.  And thought, it's probably not good to kill a mosquito when I'm surrounded by peace loving people and a bunch of little shrine statue things (more on this in the upcoming park tour post).  But then I realized there were about four more biting me and I couldn't even FEEL them.  Sneaky.  So then I didn't feel bad and killed a bunch.  

4pm = perfect sunlight hours.

On another morning in the park I had seen an older Japanese woman walking barefoot over these stones.  Up one side of the rail and then back down the other.  Since I'm trying to absorb as much culture as possible, I tried it this weekend.  Let me just say that I think this art takes practice and strong feet muscles in order to come out on the other side without bruises.  I'll keep practicing and let you know if it gets better.

Maybe if I could read the instructions it would have gone a little better?  Probably not.

I'm just going to let you draw your own conclusions on what happened here.  

Again, perfect sunlight hours.  Baby point&shoot camera still has it!

My bicycle has a built in lock.

And a bell!

But not as cool as this kid's.  

Saturday night was spent with German friends and my coworker at a bar in Osaka.  I was so tired by the evening (maybe grocery shopping and killing mosquitoes in another country is really exhausting??) but it was really nice to spend time with friends.  Tried shochu which is a kind of Japanese liquor; the one I tried was made from sweet potatoes.  Maybe around 20% alcohol so not very strong but an interesting flavor for sure.

Egg sandwich + persimmon with coffee on Sunday morning.  Perfection.  I've only had persimmons in Japan that I can remember.  So good.  Flavor is difficult to describe but it looks like an orange tomato and has a texture mixed between a melon and apple I think.  So good.

Meant to get up and go shopping for some housewares but I ended up sleeping in, going to the park, washing laundry and blogging.  Such a nice day.

Also made crabcakes.

Twice.  Much better the second time around and with actual crab.  Maybe the glass of wine helped??

So future posts that I have in the works are an apartment tour, a mini office tour and a park tour with an explanation of my nutrition and exercise goals while I'm in Japan.  Get pumped.