thursday

Today, Satoshi had the day off, so we went down to the Immigrations Office to re-new my visa. Three years ago, the office was in downtown Osaka. Now, it is 15 minutes from downtown Osaka, on a man-made island, which has the city of Osaka in major debt. Anyway, we got there and filled out the forms then stood in line to get my visa re-newed.

Our number was called five minutes after turning in our forms and they said that after they check through all of our paperwork, a postcard will be mailed to us and we will have to come back to go through the actual re-newal.

I guess with all the stuff we forgot in the past three years, this was one of them. So, now we'll just have to wait until the postcard comes...

Last Thursday's breakfast was a fried egg with okonomiyaki sauce, tsukudani (seasoned seaweed), chirimen sansho (whitebait seasoned with Japanese pepper), umeboshi (pickled plum), rice, an orange and green tea.

Since I had my beads class, I had lunch at Umeda--shrimp pasta, a salad and bread.

There was also a Hokkaido fair at a department store, so I picked up these chocolate covered karinto by Royce. I've written about karinto, here and about Royce, here. Fried dough and chocolate, doesn't get better than that, huh?

Since Satoshi had dinner plans, my dinner was chicken wings. Not too nutritious without veggies, but I was being lazy.

wednesday

On Wednesday, Satoshi had the day off. I have to re-new my visa soon, so we called the Immigrations office.

We were surprised to find out that we need to gather lots of paperwork before we go down to the office. (It has been 3 years since my last re-newal, the office said that we always needed this amount of paperwork, so we just probably forgot how much was needed. Also, within the 3 years the office has since moved to a more inconvenient area...sigh.)

So, after a breakfast of omlette with pizza sauce, cranberry-lavender bread with cream cheese, an orange and coffee, we headed back to the city office to pick-up the necessary paperwork. (Had I known I needed this paperwork, I could have picked it up the day before...double sigh)

For lunch, we wanted to eat soba, but as we neared the soba shop near the city office, we found that it was closed on Wednesdays, so we headed towards an Italian restaurant, but that was also closed.

Since both of our options for lunch were closed, we decided to wait awhile longer for lunch and get the paperwork needed.

After getting the paperwork, we decided to try a relatively new cafe called Wakan. This cafe is located right across the city office.

The lunch of the day was fried salmon with miso soup, a salad, some simmered veggies and rice. (800 yen, about US$8)

We also added dessert and coffee--cake topped with pannacotta in a cute little bottle. (200 yen, about US$2)

After lunch, we then headed to Umeda to pick-up more electronics (printer, USB flash drive, return the printer ink for the now un-useable printer) and had dinner at Capricciosa, a franchise Italian restaurant. (We used to have this restaurant in Hawaii, I wonder if it is still there?) Anyway, whenever we eat at Italian restaurants, if we can order things a la carte, we usually share a salad, some kind of pasta and a pizza.

It was a busy Wednesday, but a delicious one as well.

Wakan (UPDATE:as of 2012, this shop is now closed)
3-1-9 Nishikoji, Ooki Building 1F
Minoo, Osaka
Phone: 072.725.7127
Open: 9:00-20:00