Today was a day to wander around Umeda with my mom, sister, aunt, and aunt’s sister-in-law. It always involves eating and shopping for odd things. First was my failure to pick a decent place to eat. We went for omurice, or rice omlettes, and there was a good place at the top of Yodobashi Camera but the place we went was in the basement of the Hankyu Sanbangai.
That’s my mom, my aunt, and my not-really-my-aunt.
It just wasn’t all that tasty. Not awful, but not great.
Afterwards we went wandering around shopping at Yodobashi Camera at first, getting hats for my mom and my aunt. My mom kept telling my aunt to throw away her hat since it’s 30 years old, but you know how little a younger sister’s opinion can mean at times. My favorite t-shirt shop is gone (!) because of remodeling to Yodobashi Camera and so I really haven’t bought that many things for myself. I bought a gift for Dr. Kawasaki, who was given some sort of award by the Emperor of Japan, and I bought my mom a calendar. I suppose I bought myself a LAN cable that I didn’t really need and some batteries, but those hardly count as anything interesting. I’ve tried to buy things at Uniqlo, but they’re out of my size in the colors I want and there’s always another Uniqlo down the street from wherever I’m going.
In any case, we were tired and we went back to Hankyu Sanbangai to get our yearly green tea and dumplings. This is probably the third picture of the same thing on my blog. Or maybe it’s the fourth. In any case, it’s delicious.
I think my aunt, my mom, and my not-really-my-aunt would agree.
After that we went looking for the new rooftop garden that was designed, in part somehow, by my sister’s old piano teacher’s niece. My sister’s old piano teacher still calls my mom for hours at a time several times a week (and sometimes several times a day) and would never let her hear the end of it if we hadn’t gone to see the rooftop garden. If we found the right one, it’s at the top of the fancy Isetan department store. But you know what’s also at the top of the fancy Isetan department store, at the entrance to the garden? A convenience store!
The garden itself is a work in progress and not completely interesting, but I did take some pictures.
A panorama looking north-ish, where I lived-ish. Even if you click on the picture and expand it, the place I lived is a microspeck on the image.
The trip down was more interesting than the elevator up to floor 10, the escalator to floor 11, and the the climb up the stairs to floor 14. There are a set of escalators in the covered atrium that go from floor 10 to floor 7, floor 7 to floor 4, and floor 4 to floor 1. It was just short of being spectacular. Very interesting, though.
We said goodbye to Mrs. Takanaka (my not-really-my-aunt) and my sister and I continued shopping at Hanshin where I did buy myself a plastic Hanshin Tiger’s card. Later we went to dinner at Daimaru and even more shopping at Tokyu Hands, a Japanese drug store (for yet more Japanese fingernail polish for my sister), and Sofmap (a computer/camera chain). And yet I still didn’t buy myself anything more than that plastic card. I’m failing at this consumerism thing, but it’s still more fun than being at work.
