I seem to have caught a cold. Fortunately, today we were just hanging around with my aunt and cousin. My aunt and her kid look more like me than most of the rest of my family, which is kind of odd. He’s the one who my mom and aunt call ??? or “alien” because they can’t understand what he’s talking about. There were several conversations about who is more the alien between me and him.

So we went to my aunt’s house, out to lunch, and to my cousin’s house where I passed out on the couch for a while. Stupid cold anyway.

Not really sure why we had an amuse bouche of spring roll.

Sadly, the food was much better looking than it tasted.

Fancy soup.

We had some cake and headed back to the hotel in the afternoon. I figured we should try going to the mall to find some dinner, and took a taxi. We were trying to choose between “Rock Town” and “Youme Town” and the taxi driver suggested Rock Town had more restaurants.

It was an odd mall that looked more like something in the U.S. than something in Japan. And it only had six restaurants on the mall map, and it looked like one of them was closed. It was a bit of a disappointment and so I talked to a couple of BMW salesmen who were showing cars at the mall. They told me there wasn’t much choice in the area and suggested we go to Mr. Bark, a Japanese steak & hamburger restaurant.

It was the Japanese version of an American restaurant and it wasn’t that bad. The bib is because everything comes on a hot plate and is sizzling and spattering.

So that was the day and another travel day tomorrow. Off to Okayama.