Japan Day 4: A Day of Rest
The crazy weekend kind of caught up with us today and we decided to just be lazy. Scott and Susan didn’t even get out bed until around 2:00PM (remember, when we went to bed the sun was coming out). My body is still getting used to the time difference so I was up around 10:30 or 11:00. It was nice to have that time to myself though, I wrote days two and three of these travel logs during that time.
Scott and Susan’s fridge was looking pretty baren and we were all hungry so we decided to get some Japanese pizza and hit the grocery store. Scott and I went out to get and we took Susan’s car. Susan has one of the little tiny Japanese cars, it’s called a Pajero junior. I was rather excited to ride in one of these because you see them everywhere and they just look so small. Being inside it doesn’t feel at all cramped, you are definitely sitting much closer to one another inside but it isn’t at all uncomfortable.
When we got to the pizza place I saw one of the smallest cars that I had seen yet, this thing was tiny. Check it out.
Now Susan’s car is small, but when we parked next to that thing her car looked pretty much normal. I would so love to drive it, it just looks like it would be so much fun. By the way, the car was the delivery car for the pizza place.
So Scott and I went inside the pizza place and Scott ordered us our pizza, they told us that it would be about 15 minutes so we decided to go do a little grocery shopping while we waited. Japanese grocery stores aren’t really all that weird unfortunately. They sell some really disgusting looking stuff though. The Japanese love fish and they seem to love it in many different ways. They had a huge section of just dried fish in plastic bags. And not just normal fish either. There were bags of octupus tentacles where you could still the suckers on them. Squid jerky, what appeared to be just dead fish thrown in a bag and dried out. Really disgusting stuff, if we go back I will try and take some pictures. The only other weird thing about the grocery store was that after you check out they hand you a bag and then you walk over to a counter and bag up your stuff yourself.
I guess this is a good as place as any to bring this up, the grocery store made me think of it since they had a huge one in front of the place. The Japanese love vending machines. There are tons and tons of vending machines all over the place. I guess you can find seemingly just about anything in them as well. I haven’t seen too many strange ones, the oddest one was probably the beer vending machine. But the huge one in front of the grocery store sold both hot and cold things. Scott told me that one of the hot ones was corn soup. Can you imagine a corn soup vending machine in the US?
After that we just headed back to their place and enjoyed our pizza. The pizza was different than what I am used to but still quite good, we got something with pesto, bacon, and some other stuff on it, definitely not a combo I had ever seen in the US but still tasty. We got ours with extra cheese and it was a bit too cheesy. Japanese pizza is also quite thin.
After lunch we were just lazy. They introduced me to Reno 911 which I had never seen before. Really funny stuff, I am going to have to pick it up and finish the first season, unfortunately Scott lost disc two of season one.
The time thing is really weird here for me. Whenever it’s about 4:30 I think it’s like at least 8:30, pretty much without fail and I tend to get a bit sleep between 4:00 and 7:00 but luckily I have been getting a second wind so I haven’t been passing out in the late afternoon everyday.
We just hung out for the rest of the day being lazy and watching TV. TV here is kind of funny, they get a US military channels, called AFN or American Forces Networks. It’s obviously made for the troops and military personal stationed abroad. It gets most of the big shows but I think a lot of them are delayed a year. We watched Survivor last night though and it was the current episode so that was cool. The funny thing is they don’t show comercials, instead of comercials they have lots of public service ads and funny things like don’t sexually harass your coworker ads, and motorcycles safety instructional comercials, just weird random stuff like that. AFN also doesn’t censor movies which is nice.
We finally started to get hungry and decided to go out to a Japanese BBQ place. This is the kind of place where you have the grill in your table and they just bring you the raw meat and you cook it yourself. It was pretty tasty, we had some kobe beef, chicken wings, mozarella salad (really yummy) and some cheese rolls. I fell in love with cheese rolls when we were at noname-sans (see day 3), they had a huge plate of them out for their anniversary and if you know me I love cheese and these are simply delicious. All they are is some sort of cheese wrapped in a wonton and then fried.
Oh yeah, real quick. The store next to the restaurant had a hilarious name, check it out.
After dinner we went home and watched a little TV and Scott made us all some Chuhais which are a really yummy drink made with shochu and juice, Scott used grapefruit. Then I introduced them to Brian Regan. Somehow the other night we started talking about Flipper, Brian Regan has a bit on flipper that is hilarious so I brought it up which got us talking about him and as luck would have it I had it on my ipod. So we sat and listened to him all of us laughing are asses off. If you haven’t heard him he is really funny and he is clean so he is fun for the whole family. Check him out.
Somehow it got to be 2:00AM when we finally went to bed, not sure how that happened. Poor Scott, he has to be at school at 8:00 in the morning.
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