Manga Day

Friday poured all day, which is in one way a good thing: since it was already raining when I woke up I could prepare for it. Still, it’s hard to get ready for a constant downpour. Since the weather was so cold and wet, and I only had one class that day, a friend and I decided that it was time to try out the curry house across the street from the university. It proved to be a wise choice. I ended up ordering their seasonal specialty chicken curry soup, which had potatoes, carrots, hard boiled egg and a side of rice. Very tasty and not very expensive. On our way back to campus, I ran into some of my other friends who were going to the manga museum, and decided to tag along. For the uninitiated, manga are Japanese comics, which are almost always in black and white and tend to have complicated storylines, rather like novels, and are one way that I waste money. Anyway, the manga museum in Kyoto was having a special exhibit on the treatment and depictions of samurai in various comics, especially focusing on specific historical characters that often come up, such as Miyamoto Musashi, the Shinsengumi, and Oda Nobunaga. After that we stopped at the café attached to the museum for cake and tea and talked for awhile. It was really the best possible way to spend a cold wet day.
-Curry is the best possible rainy day food.
-Even though it was pouring out, there was no hot tea to be had at the curry place, and I wonder if this is normal.
-When a Japanese menu refers to ‘chew’ (which is I believe how they put it into roman letters) it means whipped cream.
-Once, when the Hanshin Tigers (the Osaka baseball team) won a major game, the fans stole the statue of Colonel Sanders from outside of a KFC and threw it into the river. The statue is now chained to the building.
-The manga museum has on display a scroll from the Edo period (probably 400 or so years old) that shows cartoons of frogs and rabbits, possibly the oldest example of ‘comics’ in Japan.