Interesting

Ah, a break from the consecutive busy, not very interesting days.  As I mentioned, I slept quite early last night, and woke up quite early today, around 8am in fact.  I did my laundry - and finished my laundry at around 10am. I was thinking, should I go to the grocery already?

I got the bicycle, but I ended up in school.  And I didn't leave school anymore until the seminar, which was an interesting one.  Delivered by a current University of Tokyo professor who was formerly a UN officer, it was about disaster risk reduction, which is the trend now versus yesteryear's disaster reduction, which he explained was very different from disaster risk reduction.

Anyways, the seminar ended around 3:15pm, and I was debating again whether I should go the grocery already?  I thought about it and thought about it, and next thing you know, it was 5:30pm already.  Our meeting time for our "group date" was 6pm in downtown Atsugi - a 30 minute bicycle ride.  So what the heck, grocery shopping can wait till tomorrow.

And then wow, the food was good.  It was Indian food, all-you-can-eat, and I haven't ever eaten that much since I came to Japan.  There were samples of Tandoori Chicken, Samosa (a kind of potato empanada dipped in ketchup), Fish Fry which was really good, Cauliflower Fry which was also surprisingly good, and then the all-you-can-eat nan, this other bread, Indian rice, and 4 kinds of curry - ebi (shrimp) curry, chicken curry, keema (mutton) curry, and vegetable curry.  Yum-mee.  We were told it's drink-all-you-can as well, so I had a couple of beers.  Turns out it wasn't drink-all-you-can for beer.  I should have just tried the Lasi.  And the Mango Lasi.  There's always a next time.  I heard that at that restaurant, it was only eat-all-you-can because our Indian colleagues arranged it so, and that there needed to be at least 10 people.  I think there was 17 of us.  Fun!  I really love the bread (nan), especially the garlic nan, and the keema curry!  Of course the Indian way was to use the hand, and maybe I and every one tried doing that but it wasn't so comfortable so thankfully there were spoons and forks and knives. :-D

After dinner, some went home and some wanted to go out for some more drinks, and so I went out for some more drinks.  I didn't know Atsugi had such cozy places for just relaxing and chatting with friends over some drinks.  I also got to speak with some Japanese, and supposedly I was to exercise my Japanese, but I ended up exercising their English. :-D  Anyways, because I was getting sneezy with beer, I had what they call a "Kiwi Sour" drink.  It's basically Kiwi (fruit) with "Sour," which was kind of a Japanese alcoholic thingy.  It wasn't so strong.

By the way, I learned that "draft beer" is nama bi-ru in Japanese.  Here's a joke for all ye Pinoys: Use nama bi-ru in a sentence.... Di ka nama bi-ru e! :-P