Update 6/9

Well, yet another week begins, with Monday and Tuesday leaving me very little to do aside from my Japanese lessons. This past weekend was a lot of fun: on Saturday we had some of our new Japanese friends over for Korean food. One of them brought her 5 year-old daughter who's enrolled at a local international school and thus speaks English relatively well. We taught her how to play Life (the board game), the Japanese version of which Katie found at the local recycle shop for a measly 300 yen. For dinner we made sam gyeop sal, or barbecued pork grilled alongside various toppings which you then roll into a sesame leaf and eat with your hands. It tasted exactly the same as what we ate in Busan, which pleased us - and our tummies - greatly.

Sunday I really wanted to get out of the house, having spent Saturday cleaning up, going grocery shopping, and helping to prepare dinner. Katie and I decided to go to the Osaka aquarium, which we had heard was a great way to spend an afternoon. After the obligatory Sunday breakfast of blueberry pancakes (the packet of frozen blueberries we bought at Costco several months ago are still going strong), Katie tended the garden for a bit, then we headed downtown. Admission to the aquarium was outrageously expensive, so we decided to buy a day pass which, in addition to covering the aquarium's entrance fee, would allow us to ride the subway as much as we wanted for free. The aquarium itself looks like a giant modern art installation, sitting on Osaka Bay. Inside we saw all kinds of fish in an incredible array of sizes, shapes, and terrifying-ness. The main attraction is the whale shark which easily dwarfs the next biggest fish in the entire aquarium several times over. The best part of the whole thing, though, wasn't what lives in the water, but what spends most of its time above it. Katie and I spent a lot of time at the otter, penguin, seal, and sealion tanks. It helps that those animals are the cutest ones, but there you are.

After the aquarium we rode the subway to Shinsaibashi in South Osaka to eat at an Ethiopian restaurant we had heard about. It was expensive (and we were the only ones eating there, which worried me a little), but the food was so damn good. It made me miss Mesob in Charlottesville so much, and filled me with regret for all of the great Ethiopian restaurants in DC I neglected to try when I lived so nearby. At the bar sat two barrel-chested and bearded Ethopian fellows - I could tell they were authentically Ethiopian because of their narrow-bridged noses. Otherwise, it would be safe to assume they were Nigerian, since those are really the only black people you see in Japan on a regular basis. They spoke a bizarre pidgin of English and Japanese, and chatted away over their beers unperturbed by the conspicuous lack of customers on a Sunday evening. Sometimes Katie and I wonder how it is that these places we love - a Vietnamese hole-in-the-wall in Nishinomiya, a pizzeria in Osaka that serves up pizzas blessedly unadorned with creative Japanese topping like corn and mayonnaise, any number of Turkish restaurants in Kobe, etc. - manage to stay in business when we seem to be the only ones patronizing them. I like to think they're all fronts for the Yakuza.