{"id":1488,"date":"2007-11-01T07:22:06","date_gmt":"2007-11-01T14:22:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.i8u.org\/blog\/?p=1488"},"modified":"2007-11-01T07:56:10","modified_gmt":"2007-11-01T14:56:10","slug":"wandering-around-umeda","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.i8u.org\/blog\/?p=1488","title":{"rendered":"Wandering around Umeda."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>We didn&#8217;t go very far today. We started out wandering around looking for a Starbucks. The coffee in the few places we&#8217;ve tried was disappointing, so we thought we&#8217;d get something that we knew was bad. On the way we found some ridiculously expensive stores, Gucci, Swarovski, Bulgari, and, oddly enough, Sony. Sony has a neat new Organic LED video screen coming out but I think it&#8217;s $1700 for an 11&#8243; screen. The picture was beautiful, but I don&#8217;t watch anything that requires a $1700 screen. We finally found the Starbucks and I had the Matcha latte, which was surprisingly good.<\/p>\n<p>We met an old friend from Portland for lunch and she took us to an okonomiyaki store. Her family and our family go way, way back. I think her mom moved back to Japan for a while and she grew up here, even though her grandparents were in Portland. I had &#8220;modanyaki&#8221; which I guess is really &#8220;Modern Yaki.&#8221; It has soba mixed in with the okonomiyaki.<\/p>\n<p><a href='https:\/\/www.i8u.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/11\/modan_yaki.JPG' title='Modanyaki.'><img src='https:\/\/www.i8u.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/11\/modan_yaki.thumbnail.JPG' alt='Modanyaki.' \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>She also took us to get some Japanese sweets, dango and matcha bean paste.<\/p>\n<p><a href='https:\/\/www.i8u.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/11\/mochi.JPG' title='Matcha shirotama.'><img src='https:\/\/www.i8u.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/11\/mochi.thumbnail.JPG' alt='Matcha shirotama.' \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Her kids are both going to college next year, so we didn&#8217;t get to see them or her husband who almost got his PhD at Portland State University. A.B.D. is a sad place to be. I think he even had his thesis mostly finished before he moved back to Japan to take care of the family business.<\/p>\n<p>After that we just did some more random shopping. When I first tried to buy a new PSP at one of the local stores and the lines were horrendous. It&#8217;s the start of the month and I think they released some new games. I did finally get the PSP, which is a replacement for the one that was stolen last week. Now to see if it will work in the US. I&#8217;m still just randomly punching buttons instead of reading the instructions for these Japanese games.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We didn&#8217;t go very far today. We started out wandering around looking for a Starbucks. The coffee in the few places we&#8217;ve tried was disappointing, so we thought we&#8217;d get something that we knew was bad. On the way we found some ridiculously expensive stores, Gucci, Swarovski, Bulgari, and, oddly enough, Sony. Sony has a neat new Organic LED video screen coming out but I think it&#8217;s $1700 for an 11&#8243; screen. The picture was beautiful, but I don&#8217;t watch anything that requires a $1700 screen. We finally found the Starbucks and I had the Matcha latte, which was surprisingly good. We met an old friend from Portland for lunch &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.i8u.org\/blog\/?p=1488\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Wandering around Umeda.<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1488","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.i8u.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1488","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.i8u.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.i8u.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.i8u.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.i8u.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1488"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.i8u.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1488\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.i8u.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1488"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.i8u.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1488"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.i8u.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1488"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}