October 23, 2009 - Friday

Sunny and warmish.

I had a good day today. I wasn't sure at the beginning though. I really didn't want to get up this morning. It was only the fact that I had a 3 pm class that made me get out of bed at all! I think the apartment was cold and I was warm in bed. There wasn't any news on, and there weren't any interesting programmes on either so I did all the showering/dressing stuff early.

I had a pleasant enough time at home, and around 2 I left for my school. I bumped into an ex-ex-student, from a long time ago and said hi. At my school I did the set up and changed.

When my student came we chatted for a bit and then got on with the lesson. She hadn't been able to come last week for personal reasons but hadn't been able to study either. That meant two weeks without English. Oh dear. At the end of class I tried to impress upon her the necessity of studying, even just for 5 minutes a day. In fact, I suggested that she read over her notes before she goes to bed. I think 5 minutes that she really does is better than 2 hours of hard slogging that she resents.

I read the paper, had a coffee at the school and then decided to take myself home. It was dark out and I was in dark clothing, so I wore a couple of reflecting bands on my clothes. I used one on my ankle to keep my pants our of the chain. I made good time and surprised my husband who was already at home, eating --what else? Ramen.

We chatted for a while and then discussed what to do for dinner. He suggested some really great places, but I didn't feel my clothing was good enough, so I changed. We tried to go to the Grande Elson, but it was really packed there. They had someone in the parking lot directing traffic, so we changed our minds and went to Hyakkenbori instead.

Hyakkenbori is a Japanese restaurant attached to one of the universities in Tsuruoka. They tend to use local food and cook it in interesting ways. It's very Japanese, but not in a stuffy way. I usually enjoy what we have there. Tonight was no exception. We had a seasonal dish with 9 mini appetizers. We had things from a piece of sushi in a ball, to a cabbage roll, to a few things that I couldn't identify! We also had sashimi, a vegetable stew, and fish tempura with rice and soup. Almost everything was good. There was some bean thing that I didn't really like, but overall, yum. The fish was cooked with the bones intact, which made it a bit troublesome for me. Supposedly it's the kind of dish that you can eat the bones, but I couldn't always. The texture of the bones didn't do anything for me. For dessert we had a mixture of matcha and sweet potato pureed with local fruit on the side. Even though I'm not a matcha fan, I thought it was a nice way to end the meal.

We came home after our meal and F made coffee. I had sort of "booked" the TV tonight. WOWOW had a movie on that Roger Ebert praised and I wanted to see. I watched it, F tried, but nodded off a little here and there. The film was Things We Lost in the Fire with Halle Berry and Benicio Del Toro. I liked it, but there were a few times when I lost the thread. Worth watching, and quite different than expected.

And that's about that for my day. It was much better than most Fridays. Tomorrow I have one class again, but may stay at my school to do a bit of work. Depends if hubby needs me for something or not! Night.