A weekend at home

I know its fun to imagine us doing all sorts of fun things on our days off. Maybe we're taking pictures at an antique temple, maybe we're trying traditional cuisine on tatami mats... But the sad reality is that we still havent gotten many chances to explore Japan. After living here for 2 months I still haven't gotten my first full paycheck. We're basically still living off the last of the money we brought with us. We've had to be very responsible with our funds, since lots of it has gone into creating our new lives here- phones, internet, furniture, bills, FOOD.

I think its important to keep in mind that, yes, we are living in an amazing exotic land, but we are still living here. As in we're not on one big vacation and we have regular lives to live out here. I often feel pressure to go out and experience something grand on our weekends, and we try to do that as affordably as we can. However, sometimes we just have normal life stuff to do, and its important that we allow ourselves to just relax and enjoy a normal weekend at home. So in honor of this, our relaxing weekend at home, I thought I'd give you an idea of how we hang out.

 First, as everyone should on all Saturdays, we slept in. Late. I woke up around 9:30 but stayed in bed watching Gilmore Girls on my laptop. Maybe around 11:30 Kris started to wake up, but the Gilmore Girls continued. At some point we ate some sandwiches in bed, similar to this one:

The sandwiches we had today were egg salad, katsu and anko with butter. The anko one was a new one I tried- it was OK but I probably won't get it again. The katsu and egg salad are favorites of ours. So we ate our sandwiches in bed while Kris looked at stuff on his tablet and I continued to watch Gilmore Girls. Finally at 3:00 we decided to get our day started and by 4:00 we were out the door.

We first wanted to go to Treasure Factory, our local secondhand store, to look for some hair clippers. Kris' beard trimmer charger has gone missing and our hair clippers arent compatible with the electricity here or something, they're super loud and crazy and nothing we do fixes it. To get there we walk on this amazing path over a hill, its a long relaxing walk.

At Treasure Factory we didn't find any clippers worth buying. Its always fun looking around there though. Theres always some amazing find like these beauties:

 

So after Treasure Factory we headed to the train station, our local hub of all shopping and restaurants. We needed to go to the Seria dollar store to pick up a couple small things like post it notes and magnetic hooks. After Seria it was 6:00 so we wanted to get dinner. We decided on a ramen shop under the Toho Cinemas. 

Then we went next door to a small dessert cafe and ate this amazing strawberry treat. Theres soft serve and vanilla ice cream on top of cake bits with frozen strawberries and raspberry syrup and underneath everything... frosted flakes! Weird, right? But super delicious and a nice crunch.

Anyways, after that we headed home. Its about a 15-20 minute slow walk back home. Of course once we finally, finally got home at 8:00PM we walked into the front door anndd.... I forgot my phone at the cafe. So we rode the bus back to the station, wasting money on the trip, but luckily my phone was behind the counter. Then we rode the buss back home and got to relax by 9:00PM. Now it's 10:15PM, and I'm just about to finish this post so we can have some movie time! We aim to get through the original 3 Star Wars movies this weekend and the first one shows tonight. Time to get started!

K+K