This was the day I was planning to head for Tokyo, but I’m hanging out with old family friends instead.

I started out looking for a morning set and was striking out. One place my sister and I went said on Instagram that they open at 7am but I guess they changed to 10am now. I ended up at Choco cro and had a small ham end egg thing. It was good and they even heated it up for me. This was my third cup of coffee since there’s a Nespresso machine in my fancy hotel room!

I had some time to kill since my friend was driving his EV minvan down from Niigata to Toyama. I went to a park that was surprisingly near the station. There’s a big walkway around the river and this is a pedestrian bridge in the park. You can go up both of the towers and get a good view of the area.

Here’s the view of the Northern Japan Alps and “the most beautiful Starbucks in the world” (someone may have stuffed the ballot box). But it is nice and the area is pretty.

I met with my friend around 10:40 and we went to his mom’s. We used to visit here all the time when we came to Japan with my mom. The three of us went out for ramen. I made even more mistakes. I got the chashu ramen with extra spring onions because the picture on the menu of the normal ramen seemed to have neither. But it had both! I didn’t need the extra onions nor did I need the extra pork. (This picture is sure to horrify my sister who hates all things onion.)

We had to go to a fast charger to charge my friend’s EV. They do have a small charger at his mom’s but it would take days to charge his car enough to drive back to Niigata. We also went to three different stores to look for some JA (the agricultural collective) gummy candies my sister wanted but we struck out. Two grocery stores didn’t have anything and the JA store closed at 4pm, shortly before we arrived.

We ended up buying too much food at the grocery store for the three of us but we ate most of it (like almost all of it.) It doesn’t show the five korokke that we also got.

Right now I am kind of mad because I’ve ordered the same pen twice from Amazon and it was canceled both times. Now it says the shipping will take so long that there’s no way I’m getting it. I think I can get it in the US for only a little more so I’ll give it a try there. Wish me luck.