takafumi came to visit us on saturday evening and stayed the night. on sunday i made a big (japanese) breakfast: rice, miso soup, omletes, pickled cucumber, and left-overs from the night before (simmered pumpkin and potatoes). the omlets were a bit of a bust, i just don't have enough practice with turning them so they don't roll up right. plus, they didn't cook well, either, so i just gave up and mushed them all together. since i added cheese and green onions they were pretty delicious anyway.

then we went bowling. on the way, we wanted to take our recycling (which we didn't do the week before since we were visiting friends around the island). however, when we got there (in munakata we have a recycling center where one takes their plastics, glass, metals and papers, as well as random items that can't go in the burnable garbage. other places in japan often have pick ups for this, but not munakata. anyway...), there was a line of cars up the street. it can be crowded first thing in the morning (they open at nine, but only on saturday and sunday) so we thought we'd go bowling and then to lunch first.

we did three games at bowling. takafumi kicked our butts the first game, yoshi got the most points in the second game, and by some fluke, i won the last game. actually, yoshi bought us some bowling shoes (!) so that may have helped. and takafumi was pretty tired i think. even with a broken ass i can still bowl: i actually did well, i got more than 130 points in the third game!!

lunch was at the all-you-can-eat japanese/italian restaurant that emphasizes vegetables in its dishes; yoshi likes it a lot. after lunch we drove past the recycle place again but it was still really busy. so, we decided to go home and recycle next weekend. i figure that most people keep their recycling outside but with the strong typhoon coming our way, they had to recycle! we keep a lot of our recycling inside (but try to go every week) so it's not too big a problem for us.

for the afternoon, we decided to go to an onsen. there's an onsen town near us (wakita, in wakamiya town). we have been here a year but haven't been there yet. so, we piled into takafumi's car and headed out. the onsen we chose was beautiful! it was a rotenburo onsen, and was very beautiful. there were five baths, all outside. hiro and i went into the women's bath and yoshi and taka went into the men's (obviously.) it occurs to me that we need a girl because when we're older hiro will go with the men...anyway, hiroyuki was admired, as always, by young girls and old ladies alike. he wasn't as shy or scared of the big bath as always. he was actually splashing and having a good time. although the parking lot was full, there were only about ten other ladies (and a few children) in the baths. apparently the men's side was full! lucky us!

after bathing, we got back in the car and drove to costco. takafumi had never been, so we just walked around and looked at everything. then we had a hotdog (well, taka had a hot dog and yoshi and i shared one.) that was good because the hotdogs come with a (all you can drink) soda. we took our drinks to the mall and had our real dinner: udon and donburi (yoshi had katsu-don and taka had oyako-don). hiro shared my udon. after that we went home. it was a great day....now we're just waiting for the typhoon.