Random photos again

I guess it is time for another random post.  I have so many non-related pictures in my files!

A few of my friends and I went out for lunch this week, to celebrate one friend's birthday.  We went to a Thai restaurant and had a special meal with Thai curry, salad rolls, tamyankun soup (I have no idea how to spell that) steamed fish in lemon sauce...   Delicious all!  This was the platter that the salad rolls were set on.  The owner of the restaurant also does vegetable carving and there were beautiful roses made of beets, a wreath of pumpkin...

When the owner heard that we were celebrating a birthday, he whipped out this icicle radish which was carved to say "Congratulations!"  I suppose his radish can be used to adorn birthdays, graduations, anniversaries etc... 

I spent a few hours with the city's traffic safety division, instructing the 6th graders at the school where I do crosswalk duty on the rules of Bicycle safety.  We set up road signals and the 6th graders went through the mock course learning how to check for oncoming cars, cross railroad tracks etc.  I think the students were rather bored by the whole thing as most of them have been riding bicycles around the neighborhood for years but they will all be bicycling to middle school from April and thus the city tries to make sure they know the rules.

I took this picture one morning near the crosswalk when some of the children were walking to school.  It had been cold the night before but the morning was warming up and there was a mist rising from the streets and sidewalks.

Also at the crosswalk one morning, a couple of girls were complaining about the weight of the tote bags that they had to carry and I looked inside to see what all they had.  I was rather surprised to see that both girls (twins) had Smartphones in their bags.

"I didn't know you kids were allowed to carry Smartphones to school.  Have the rules changed?"

"Ha-ha!  These aren't Smartphones!  They are colored pen cases!"

Sure enough, the "Smartphones" opened up to reveal pens.  They really looked real in the tote bags though!

When visiting my friend last week, she offered me the choice of Haagen-Dazs sweet bean with chestnuts mochi ice cream or cherry blossom bean paste mochi ice cream.  As sweet bean ice cream is rather common in Japan, I chose the cherry blossom ice cream and it was delicious!

We are heading into the cherry blossom season and there are a lot of seasonal foods flavored with cherry blossoms in Japan!

We were visiting OTHER friends this week (doing a lot of socializing these days!) and their grandchildren were visiting.  We got to their house at lunch time and the four year old was just beginning to eat some soybeans that Grandma had made.  I took an interest in these trainer chopsticks...  Can you see how there are three white finger holes in the chopsticks?

This isn't a great photo but I was trying to show the finger holes. One for the thumb, one for the index finger and one for the middle finger.  Although Japanese mostly eat with chopsticks, there is a right way and a wrong way to use them and more and more young people tend to scoop with chopsticks or twist their wrists around or stab at food.  If someone looked at my hand position closely they would probably say I don't hold my chopsticks correctly... but it gets the job done.  I had never seen trainer chopsticks in use but the little girl was very skillfully eating her soybeans one by one!

Grandma and Grandpa had ordered a special Girls' Day cake because March 3rd is Girls' Day in Japan.  What a pretty cake with the two girls' names written on the chocolate heart.  Our friends' 4 year old grand daughter was very excited about celebrating Girls' Day!