It's all happenings, vol 3

There's a temple just outside our little street, and yesterday during my 3 trips to the local hardware store (I had an idea that ultimately worked, but, man, that's too many god damned trips to one store) I noticed they were setting up for some kind of outdoor-food thing. So, later, Scout and I walked over to see what was what.

It's a Shinto temple and, y'know, I'm not, so I felt a little out of place - in addition to being, y'know, out of place generally. Are-we-supposed-to-be-here is a minor thing; surely someone will say something and we'll apologize and leave; no biggie. But there's the whole what-if-we're-not-wanted thing that I was worried about. So as we walked in I had a look on my face like 'Uhhhh... is this okay?' An elderly lady saw me and smiled, sort of welcoming us. It was comforting.

As we walked around the maybe-one-acre area some old dudes who had beer started saying beeru over and over - it took me a second to clock that they were doing a sort of we-have-beer-here-if-you-want-some universal light-hearted thing. That was also comforting, altho I thanked them and moved on. But then we saw the hot dogs and were all 'Damn!'. We bought 2. Jesus - they were good. Whole meat (pork I think) - as opposed to whatever's in American hotdogs. Amazing. I wanted to eat more, but I also didn't want to be the bloated American sitting on the ground in a temple with a pile of hot dogs in front of me. But christ they were good.

There's also this thing here called dorayaki. It's essentially 2 pancakes grown together with a filling of red-bean paste - a sort of sweet, but usually not sweet enough, filling popular as all hell here. (The Japanese don't appear to like sweets much. Their donuts and ice-cream and non-foreign dessert things are barely sweetened at all - which is sort of nice usually.) As we walked by the folks selling it (everything was about $1 each), they offered us some, saying 'puresento' - present. We took them and, after eating one (delish!), we tried to give them some money - they declined and we thanked them graciously. They were very kind. Then I had a wee bowl of grilled potato chunks that a lady started, and after a long, long time stopped, slathering butter on. Carbs and butter, as the Constitution informs, go amazingly together.

That was cool. We didn't stay long, but we had fun stopping by. Signs all over the neighbohood appear to say there will be another one (of whatever it was) on September 20th. (There's about a holiday a month here, but yesterday wasn't one.) I'll be stopping by with ¥100 coins at the ready....