The weekend was really nice! A night in Shizuoka and a night in Shimizu.
Shizuoka was nice. Met up with Brent, Natasha, Kath, and Kath’s co-teacher Emi for a night of eating and singing. We started at a nice izakaya which Natasha and Kath had been to earlier that day, in an effort to collect Amelie-style photographs for friends and boyfriends back home. They got a snap of the sushi chef holding “Happy Birthday!” signs. Good food and fun conversation. We moved on to another bar, where Brent quickly dropped his beer on the floor in response to an offer of green tea ice cream from Natasha. That place had good selection, but was way too pricey - an average US$7.00 cover charge! So we moved on to karaoke. 2 hours of top hits of the 70’s and 80’s left us feeling pretty happy. Late late night, ended at Kath’s house, who happened to live in Shiz.
Brent started the day right for us with his “action adventure” pancakes. He made shaped-to-order pancakes for us. After some lazing about, we got a train to Shimizu to check out Natasha’s and Brent’s home city. We decided to try an izakaya that Natasha passed every day on her ride to school. A truly truly small place - sat about 8 people, so when we walked in, we were half of the clientele.
Clearly, the two kind older ladies running the place weren’t expecting hungry forgeigners. We ordered some delicious gyoza - the greasiest gyoza I’ve had to date, and 4 yakisobas. Well, they opened the fridge to find enuf ingredients for only 2 yakisobas. We switched to two orders of pan-fried marinated beef. Half way thru the yakisoba, one of the ladies walks out and whispers to me that they don’t have any gyuniku (beef), but would umaniku be ok? Well, considering that they didn’t really have anything else of substantial volume on the menu, horse would have to do.
Heh, the other eaters got a good kick when the slabs of horse, complete with rib pieces, came out from behind the counter. It wasn’t too much longer before they were requesting us to sing. (Every bar/izakaya/eatery has a karaoke system - it’s prolly a zoning law of some sort.) Brent, fortunately has a singer’s voice (musical actor back in BC), so he surprised them all with some smooth tones.
One of the men there was a firefighter, and chose me to go outside with him so he could show me his car. He had a pretty nice custom van - trim lights, track lights on the inside, DVD, and all sorts of crazy mods. Even an English-speaking car security system!
Well, we finished up and then rented a movie and watched it at Brent’s. I love the Triplets of Belleville. Go rent it now!
The next day, Brent and I went to the port area and relaxed and talked a long good while. Way way back, I was talking about missing a catalyst element in my local life, well, Brent certainly has come to be a good friend. He’s a traveler (saw most of Central and South America), and very relatable. I’m glad to have a close friend close by again!
Unfortunately, I didn’t use my camera that much this weekend (I’ll have to copy some photos from the others), but I’ve put up two.