8/29/14

It’s been a nice slow day.  I organized care packages and wrote a letter to my dojo family to go along with the care package I’m sending them (a stenciled drawing from the anime museum for Jose, erasable pens for Chemil, and black sesame honey candy for everyone else).  I stopped by a stationery store yesterday, which was really dangerous.  Their paper and stickers are super cool, I might actually become one of those people who fucking loves stickers.  Ugh.  However, I got home, wrote a letter, folded it, addressed the enveloped and placed the letter carefully inside only to discover that there is no lick-so-seal glue on any of the envelopes I bought.  Apparently a bottle of glue or some pretty tape are common ways to seal an envelope here, which struck me as rather quaint once I got over a flush of annoyance (there are bottles of glue at the post office, in fact).  I Facetimed with dad for a while, showed him the black sesame honey, and ate ramen for late lunch before heading out.

I met Ryann and Annie at Sakurayama Jinja, and we took a nice walk around Morioka Castle Park, during which Ryann shocked the shit out of me by pulling a beer out of her purse and drinking it as we walked.  After sitting by the river on some lovely benches and chatting for a bit, Annie showed Ryann and I an adorable little cafe on the opposite bank of the Nakatsu river right by the old Iwate bank, across from the tourist center.  I had coffee, Ryann had another beer, and Annie had curry.  A piano sat behind Annie, and at the end of the night, one of the two other patrons sat down and played a little.

As we enjoyed our food and drink, a man whom we later discovered to be named Hiro interrupted us very politely to ask our opinion on a song his students are thinking of doing a performance to.  It’s LMFAO’s “Party Rock Anthem.”  We agreed that any song whose lyrics include instructions to “shake that” is probably inappropriate, but that it’s a very dance-able song, and the ultimate decision should be his.  He turned out to be an English teacher for teenagers, and used to teach at Zenrinkan.  He also used to work at a family-run electronics distributor, but business was slow, so he became an ESL teacher.