Starbucks and nabe

Today we headed into Kanazawa to meet up with some of Amy’s friends at Starbucks (I had the sakura cake) and to go to a late evening enkai. During our exploring we found the new location of the Animate store there. It’s conveniently located just up the street from the old location. :) This is the store where I dropped most of my money on the last trip and where I bought most of the random anime merchandise I brought back. I’m going to be a bit better this time around, but it’s still going to be fun. They take Visa. :)

Part of the danger is not only is it just the Animate store, but now it’s in a four story building that’s filled with anime, manga, model/figure parts and Lolita Goth clothes. There’s even a cafe that I’m going to have to visit. I’m going to have a lot of fun exploring the building, though it’s up in the air right now which day I will be going back to shop. Today was just a quick pass through. :) They had some beautiful figures though.

The enkai was fun and I was happy to discover that while I am absolutely crap at remembering Japanese phrases to speak I’m better at figuring out what people are talking about. Well, the really simple conversations they’re polite enough to have around the chick who only speaks English, anyway. :) I got a little impromtu lesson on pronunciation and phrases.

The food was interesting. I was happy it started out with sashimi, battered chicken and roast potatoes because I have a fish aversion and that was what was served for the last two courses. We had nabe that basically had a fish chucked into it which I tried to avoid. I was served some of the veggies that were in the nabe and towards the end of the evening they brought out a big bowl of rice, eggs in a bowl and some chopped onions. (I think they were green onions, anyway.) This was all stirred into the leftover broth and fish left in the nabe pot and I ate some of that once it was checked for fish chunks. :) It was surprisingly tasty! (I had a horror movie moment when I witnessed someone eating a fish eye. Way to combine two of my least favorite things: fish and gross things happening to eyes. Uh!)

All in all an enjoyable evening meeting some friendly Japanese people and watching them interact. The night was capped by watching a drunk man yell at a parked cab while we were waiting to pull into traffic. Our cab driver was laughing at him. It was all quite amusing. I think someone said that he didn’t like the company of the cab that was taking his verbal abuse.

And I still have shopping at Animate to look forward to and another trip to Kyoto on Tuesday. I found out they have a manga museum that opened a couple of years ago and I’m going to try to go.

Normally this would be a practical joke

I mentioned in my last post that one of the souvenirs I got in Kyoto was a small container of candied sakura blossoms. I figured I’d give them a try today and…

I was rather disgustingly reminded that sugar and salt look really really similar. Blech!

Amy doesn’t know why the store was selling salted cherry blossoms, but figured it was a cooking ingredient.

I’m just glad I tried them before giving them to someone as a gift. Amy spit it out when she tried it… I actually swallowed the bit I ate and it took a good two hours to clear the taste.

Beware snack buying in foreign countries!!