quest

There truly is nothing that I enjoy more than to spend time with people I love.

Following a breakfast of pancakes and nutella, Jenny arrived at my room to kick about on the internet for a bit. Before too long, we biked to the train station to start the day's adventure of hunting for yukata for festival going with Ashley, Rory and Tori. As soon as we had all gathered in Minami-Hikone, we practically ran into Viva City, the large mall there. Our first affair for the afternoon? Getting fed.
and guess who finally had their proper tonkatsu meal set (tonkatsu over lettuce/salad, rice and udon).
This very happy girl.
And Ashley had tempura!

Our second order of business? Hunt down some yukatas that were cheaper than they have been everywhere the heck else. We had been finding them (reasonably cute ones) for very unreasonable prices. I'm talkin' $100 for a cotton robe, people. No pattern, no matter how cute, is worth that much money. Luckily, Rory had been to Viva City many many many times (especially recently, it's our class' favorite shopping location) and was able to show us the yukata selling stores in the mall. It was pretty easy to pick them out, the selections for each price range were small, but I'm very happy with mine. They were sets of the robe, shoes, obi (the tie) and clip on bow for under $50. Now that's more like it. On the same floor, we also found $5 grab bags of assorted accessories and absolutely ate that up as well.

Happy with our successful snatching of festival gear, we decided celebration was in order. Of the Baskin Robbins variety.

After devouring our mocha, chocolate, strawberry, oreo cookies n' cream, coffee, caramel ribbon, amazing cold concoctions of delicious ice cream wonder, we all ripped open our grab bags of $5 fun and threw everything we didn't want onto the table so we could trade. Ashley ended up with some really beautiful feather earrings as you can see in the picture above, and I'm pretty sure everyone was happy with their cache by the end of the swapping.

Ashley separated from us after the ice cream as she had to return to her homestay for dinner, and the rest of us hit up the book shop before crossing the street to Toys R Us where I bought a kanji helper game for my Nintendo DS and Rory continued to fuel his love of kaizoku sentai gokaigerr (power rangers).

Not ready to turn in for the day, we then all returned to Hikone and went to my room to try on our yukatas (except for Tori, who already has a yukata) and, of course, take too many silly pictures.

If I could, I'd make every day like today (except with Ashley being able to join us all day long instead of having to return early). It's too much fun going out into the world and experiencing things like this with these kind of people. Tomorrow starts a new week at school, but Tuesday is a cultural experience day that involves traditional Japanese drums... so! Expect another post sometime later this week.

Until then, here's a video of the Japanese crows that do silly things in Japan like hop instead of walk like normal birds. Or, you know, fly. They don't seem to like to do that, either.