July 23, 2020

Thursday - Cloudy with a spot of rain

I got up early today, and so did F. He went out to get his friends a souvenir, I got dressed. We left fairly early and made it to the Kamo Aquarium before 10:30. It was already packed! They were giving out tickets for entrance times. What with social distancing and the holiday they were trying to be responsible. Unfortunately, the time they were giving us to enter was for 12:00. Yikes!

F met up with his friends and we decided to go for coffee or something. F first wanted to go into Tsuruoka to a restaurant that I like and have lunch there. It would be an okay idea, but only if the place opened at 11:00. I didn’t think we could make it back by 12:00, but F thought we could. He checked and it didn’t open until 11:30 so we couldn’t go there. We were going to go to a bakery with a coffee area, but I remembered that there was a place closer that had a coffee area and sold gelato. We went there!

We had some nice drinks at the place, a Farmer’s Marche. They are owned by the same company that runs a coffee place I like in Tsuruoka. There was one staff member, but she was alone and I’m afraid we must have confused her as she got our drink order wrong. I didn’t want coffee, I asked for iced tea and I think that might have been the problem. We had some gelato and it was lovely. I had coffee and vanilla since the other two flavours were tomato and strawberry. The other ladies seemed to like them too.

We headed back to the aquarium where it was still really busy. We got into the proper line and went through the aquarium. It was crowded inside, but people were trying to social distance and everyone was masked up so it didn’t seem too bad. We had a good time and I think F’s friends enjoyed themselves. These friends were co-workers with F when he was young in another prefecture. They brought their daughter with them.  

Obligatory Jellyfish Shot

Jellyfish. There's more on my Insta too!

I went to the washroom and when I came out, F told me that they had to leave soon. Oh no! We had planned to go to lunch with them, but they didn’t have time. They had reservations at an onsen in the next prefecture so there was no time to lose.  

We said our goodbyes and went back into Tsuruoka. F and I decided to go to Hyakkenbori, the place we originally wanted to take our visitors. We went and had a very nice meal. F had tempura shrimp and I had a very nice pork stew. We were a bit late for the drink bar, so we just had one drink each. 

After our lovely meal, we just went back to the house! We didn’t have any other ideas. It was fine though. I was tired, so was F.

We had some relaxing time, drank some coffee and even took a bit of a nap. Neither of us was particularly hungry, so didn’t want to eat for a bit. 

After I bit I suggested to F that I could fairly easily make quesadillas for dinner if he wanted. We still had some leftover taco meat and cheese, and I could open a can or two of tuna and make two kinds. We had some Costco avocados and I thought at least one was ripe, for some guacamole. He liked the idea and so I changed into some kitchen-y clothes and got busy. 

I cleaned and cut up some cucumber for some cucumber and miso (the miso was a gift from our visitors), then cut up a couple of avocados for guacamole. One avocado was perfect, the other was half perfect!  F came into the kitchen to help, so I put him on mashing the avocados and spices together. I got on with the quesadillas. I warmed the ingredients and then went into production. F was a big help tonight, he cut up the quesadilla for me and plated them too. I put out some salsa in bowls, we had that, plus the quesadillas plus some tortilla chips and cucumber!  

It wasn’t perfect, but it was rather nice to eat at the house, have some help and not stress too much. The food was decent and we’d already paid for it! I had even made a dessert quesadilla filled with chocolate hazelnut spread. It was a bit messy but nice. 

F helped with the dishes (hurray!) and when we were done, we headed upstairs. I had asked F to take me out for a bit but ended up taking a nap. He asked me around 10 if I still wanted to go out, but I didn’t. I woke up again at 11 surprised that I had slept so long. 

I got up, started blogging and all the other nightly stuff I do, and now we are all up to date. I tried to watch a movie, I’m Still Here with Joaquin Phoenix, but I turned it off after 10 minutes. 

So that was my day. It was really nice. It was great to see F meeting up with friends. It is usually my friends that want to meet up, so I was happy that F got to have a day, or part of a day, with his old friends. Yay!

Come back later if you like and hear all about my Friday. What will we do?  I have no idea at the moment.  Until tomorrow then….