My weekend

Sunday Sempai and Greg and I went downtown, where we visited Kinokuniya as I had mentioned, and also stopped at a black pork (kurobuta) ramen place, Daikokuya, which has the best ramen I've ever had. (Black pork is just pork from Berkshire pigs, which have black fur-- it's lean and tasty.) I tried to go there a few weeks ago, but it was crowded and couldn't seat seven together (it's kind of a hole in the wall0, so we went to a very inferior ramen place several doors down. I'm not big on ramen, particularly, but Daikokuya's ramen is different. For dessert we went to the mochi place down the road and got sakura mochi-- bean paste wrapped in sticky pink rice wrapped in a pickled cherry leaf.

We had a pitcher of beer, an appetizer of sausages with mustard, a "salad" which was more like coleslaw, and the black pork ramen. Greg got a side dish of shredded black pork over rice, and Sempai had a side dish of tonkatsu, and we all got the ramen in great big brown bowls. The ramen comes with a huge tangle of noodles, chopped raw onions, bean sprouts, slices of pork, bamboo shoots, and one lightly boiled and marinated whole egg. The egg is the best part. The broth seems slightly bland at first, but that's just your tongue adjusting to the delicacy of the flavor. After several bites, it transforms into the richest and most savory pork broth you've ever had. We sucked it down like anteaters, then went back home and took our individual naps.

Today I spent the day up till now at a kata seminar at Seaside Shotokan working on Heian Yondan and Bassai Dai. It was great-- very detail-oriented. As a bonus, I bet I worked off all that ramen. My back seems OK, though I won't really know till tomorrow or the day after.

My weekend

Sunday Sempai and Greg and I went downtown, where we visited Kinokuniya as I had mentioned, and also stopped at a black pork (kurobuta) ramen place, Daikokuya, which has the best ramen I've ever had. (Black pork is just pork from Berkshire pigs, which have black fur-- it's lean and tasty.) I tried to go there a few weeks ago, but it was crowded and couldn't seat seven together (it's kind of a hole in the wall0, so we went to a very inferior ramen place several doors down. I'm not big on ramen, particularly, but Daikokuya's ramen is different. For dessert we went to the mochi place down the road and got sakura mochi-- bean paste wrapped in sticky pink rice wrapped in a pickled cherry leaf.

We had a pitcher of beer, an appetizer of sausages with mustard, a "salad" which was more like coleslaw, and the black pork ramen. Greg got a side dish of shredded black pork over rice, and Sempai had a side dish of tonkatsu, and we all got the ramen in great big brown bowls. The ramen comes with a huge tangle of noodles, chopped raw onions, bean sprouts, slices of pork, bamboo shoots, and one lightly boiled and marinated whole egg. The egg is the best part. The broth seems slightly bland at first, but that's just your tongue adjusting to the delicacy of the flavor. After several bites, it transforms into the richest and most savory pork broth you've ever had. We sucked it down like anteaters, then went back home and took our individual naps.

Today I spent the day up till now at a kata seminar at Seaside Shotokan working on Heian Yondan and Bassai Dai. It was great-- very detail-oriented. As a bonus, I bet I worked off all that ramen. My back seems OK, though I won't really know till tomorrow or the day after.