Travel Journal – Thursday 15/4 – 2010
Early morning, ramen and Shutter Island.
Well, in this writing moment it’s Saturday so our memory of what actually happened and in which order is a little bit vague. Partly because this is one really slow and almost uneventful day since we didn’t do much of interest at all.
The morning started as usual and we soon met up with Miiko in the temple and went to the Morning Prayer. She bought us a chanting book so we could chant along with the crowd. Though even with the book it wasn’t easy to even realize which prayer they were chanting. The book contains many chants and they seemed to jump from one chant to another without any warning we could see. And since our chanting book was in romaji and English even Miiko had problems finding where the prayers were.
Afterwards she introduced us to the owner of a ramen-shop and we went to her restaurant and ate a bowl of what should be spicy ramen. It was spicy, but not that spicy. The bowl we ate the first day we arrived was really spicy while this was kind of normal-ish we thought. But it was okay. Though the “desert” or what you should call it was very suspect. It was some kind of meat and vegetables in a cocoon of dough. It wasn’t good… but it was alright. Both Drak and Miiko greatly disliked this and since Miiko didn’t want to offend her friend she wanted me to eat them all, which I did. They weren’t that big after all and my stomach seems to be even deeper here than usually.
Afterwards we went back to Kita Urawa and did mostly, nothing. We hanged around in the apartment talking and trying to decide some things. Wrote some posts took it easy and discussed various things. Like that we shall start doing things on the 19th or 20th since after that we’ll have more time when we haven’t promised to do something in Kita-Urawa or with Miiko.
We also went to check internet twice. The second time though we went to eat first in the Yakuniku-place where I ate Yakuniku the first time.1 This place though was more expensive than the place in Shibuya by quite a lot, unless you take the all-you-can-eat buffet and make it count. Anyway after this we went to internet and posted some before we went back to the apartment.
Miiko had wanted to introduce us to one of her friends. A Brazilian English teacher that had lived in Japan for 20ish years. So when she finally arrived, while I was watching a movie Drak already had seen, Miiko called me and we went down and talked with her for quite some time. Apparently this teacher was into this Shinyo-en Buddhism as well and she clarified some things for us that Miiko had had trouble to explain. After that we went and watched the movie Shutter Island before we went to bed at some time I don’t even remember but quite late.
Best Regards,
Herid Fel
In case I haven’t told you, Yakuniku is when you have a hot grill in the middle of the table and you barbeque all your meat slices or vegetables as you eat. It’s like Fondue only with a small hearth and not boil. ↩
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