Our shopping tour of the greater Kobe area continued this week with a junket out to "Sanda Premium Outlet Park", a surprisingly far away shopping centre that felt like the equivalent of getting public transport from Morley to Mandurah. It's also the first time I've seen the word "premium" properly used in Japan, given that everything there was mind bogglingly posh. The word typically means "10 yen more and with a gold wrapper".
60% off and still $2000? Now we're talkin' premium.
The rest of the weekend was utterly wholesome for the most part - probably the most outrageous thing we did was buying a few interesting looking beers and having the world's most subdued beer tasting. Well, not beer as much as "happoshu", which from what I understand is fairly crappy second grade beer that they're not allowed to call beer. It's very similar and costs half as much though, so game on. Perhaps not game on for Asahi Clear though, which I'm convinced is Emu Bitter in a prettier can.
While this was going on, we tittered about our impending visitors a bit and went out to properly equip the apartment to accommodate them. This meant a portion of the afternoon was spent at Midori buying futons and other miscellany, which we then had to box and wrap up ourselves for delivery. Even though I already know what the bed-sized brown paper present being delivered tonight is, I'm still excited about unwrapping it. I'm also looking forward to constructing our new shoe rack; I'll have to make sure I turned 27 last weekend and not 62. On the way out of the shop, we had a bit of a look at the taiyaki (grilled fish-shaped cakes filled with stuff) stall, whose owner gruffly tossed us a couple for free (he's definitely getting a Christmas card this year). Out of bean paste and custard, he chose to give us the latter. How did he know?
Sunday we took the promised trip out to Sanda. When the directions finish with "and then a 20 minute bus ride", you know you're in for some serious travel time. For the most part it was all entirely too sophisticated for me, but it did give Lisa a chance to drool into some handbags. I found a nice jacket in the Armani store but the price had about three too many zeroes on the end. Luckily the mall attached to another even bigger mall, so I opted for KFC and a few UFO catchers instead. I've bought very little chocolate in Japan, but I'm never left wanting.
The sound of cicadas caught my ear as I walked past a row of machines covered in fake vines. Forget goldfish and sea monkeys; at long last you can win your very own big gross stag beetle from a UFO catcher. They come with their own little cage thing and two (count 'em) tubs of weird jelly which they presumably eat. Everyone seemed very pleased at this arrangement except the beetles. They must be dreading summer - that's when kids and men in beige shorts go out with bug nets and try to catch them off trees. If you believe all the bug fighting arcade games (which I don't, really), they are then pitted against each other. I'm sure this is a pointless exercise in the case of stag beetles - I'm imagining two tanks shooting foam balls at one another. For hours. Until one just gives up and heads off for a jelly break.
Speaking of jelly breaks, summer holidays are fast approaching and posts may be a bit sporadic over the next few weeks with all the visitors. I'll try to update as normal but failing that, expect a flood of dumb pictures and pithy one-liners in early August. "Premium" will be the only word for it.
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