I’m in NYC for my usual solo summer trip. I took the train down this morning and it was a lovely journey in light rain.
The rain had ended when I arrived and it was a hot and very humid day in the city. I drank water like a fish but even so the heat was exhausting.
I walked all day and did lots of shopping (mostly for KLS). One fun thing about the city is how it’s always changing and I found a couple of new shops Kristin will surely want to visit. Like a fool I bought lots of heavy things and labored under the weight of three heavy bags before my hotel room was ready.
The city is chock-a-block with tourists and everyone looks bright-eyed and happy. It’s wonderful to see NYC back to normal after the weird times of Covid.
I’m here for two nights and tomorrow I have a tourist activity planned. If you remember my summer trips of the previous two years you may be able to guess what it is…
Now it’s time to write some postcards and go to bed. It was a very long day 🙂
It’s time for some more licensed ramen, this time two examples I purchased recently in Japan.
We’ll start with this Chiikawa ramen, based on a popular manga series that has been licensed to hell and back. Chiikawa is super popular in Japan right now, and I saw long lines (of exclusively young women) just to enter some of the popup shops.
The ramen is soy sauce flavour, but caught my eye since it contains Chiikawa naruto (little fish cakes) which feature the characters face and are incredible finely made:
That’s not printed: the pattern extends right through the fish cake with sub-millimeter detail! I’d love to see the machine that made these. Once prepared the ramen looked like this:
And… it was almost good! The first and second bits were quite tasty, and I was about to take a third when the awful chemical aftertaste hit. That was the end of it for me, but I still liked the cute little Chiikawa faces 🙂
Next up we have this Puyo Pop ramen. Much like the Chiikawa one this is quite small – possibly intended for children – and while this is heavily branded with the characters from the game, it seems to just be a standard kitsune udon ramen and doesn’t specify a flavour. It also doesn’t promise special naruto inside.
So imagine my surprise when I opened it and found these tiny sakura flower naruto in the flavour packet! I liked the look of the noodles as well. I added the dehydrated tofu brick and hot water and this is what it looked like:
And… it’s not for me. It tasted like petrified wood, which is a shame since the noodle size and texture was great. If I had bought two of these I would have tossed the flavour packet of the other and used one from a chicken ramen!
While neither of these were to my liking, both get a high score due to the cute little naruto. Next time I’m in Japan I’ll be watching out for more like these!
We went to Rochester for a few days for July 4 and a very special 80th birthday!
That’s what we lit this year, which as usual we had purchased in Pennsylvania a couple of weeks ago. Unfortunately I was stung by a wasp shortly after arriving (even now, four days later, the sting site is swollen and painful) which was a bit of a setback and required a few changes to our early July 4 plans, but luckily it didn’t impact our evening.
We purchased one of these instant fireplace logs just to see how they worked and we were extremely impressed. A single match resulted in a fire that burned for about two hours and could have easily been used for cooking. If you’ve seen these in a shop and debated buying one, I recommend it!
The fireworks were of course wonderful, and this year even more neighbors were launching their own so the sound of nearby booms and crackling was near endless.
And as usual I edited some of the highlights together (on my phone) into a brief video:
And here’s a shot of the birthday girl celebrating her 80th:
The garbage lid was a shield against potential firework mishaps, which as it turns out was almost needed when one of them fell over and launched a projectile that just missed us!
The next night the festivities continued when we went to a drive-in not far from where KLS’s parents live. It was a massive four-screen place with a mini golf course and a large food/snack shop (with eye-opening prices) that sold the biggest frozen coke I’ve ever seen! This beast was about a kilogram of frozen coke and filled a cup as big as my head. Even sharing, it took KLS and I well into the film to finish this one 🙂
While in Rochester we also visited the largest antiques mall in New York state, which has two sites and over 1000 dealers! The above is a photo taken in the larger of the two locations, showing a hall of booths each of which is full of treasures for sale. This particular site was a converted strip mall, and had dozens of halls like the above with several hundred booths in total. Kristin and I were determined to see everything, but even going at a cracking pace it took us over four hours to browse the two locations.
It was absolutely fascinating, with an incredible variety of items for sale. Of course there was lots of the usual tableware and art and decor items and the like, but there were also many unusual and specialized booths such as a seller who specialized in political badges.
I almost bought that 48-year-old King Kong glass, but you can be assured I had no interest in the weird PEZ and definitely not the sealed box of disturbing Trolls trading cards.
I browsed through those View Master slides looking for Doctor Who (without success), and I may have bought that Pac-Man bowl had it been in much better condition. The Hitler stamps though: not for me!
My big mistake was not buying this portable TRS-80 computer. A precursor to a laptop, this includes a several line LCD display and came with the programming manuals. Did it work? I don’t know. Was it worth the risk at about $56? Probably.
Even though I made the wrong decision on the computer, I did make a couple of intriguing purchases as well as hundreds of postcards. You’ll read about them one day on this blog 🙂
