Drawn to the Stand by the Halloween Trees

Today, as I was coming home from the city, I stopped by a large fruit and market stand I'd seen many times before. I'd always wondered what kind of place it was, but I didn't have the time to stop on the way up, and it was always closed on the way back. But today, I had a bit of extra time, so I stopped.

Out front, there were hundreds of mandarin oranges bagged up, and the bags were grouped according to the farm they were raised on. They were priced differently by how sweet and juicy they tasted. I tried the sample slices, and bought a bag of about 15 plum-sized mandarins('mikan' in Japanese) for 200yen, the juicy and sweet, yet mid-priced ones.

The reason I stopped, really, was because I kept seeing all these persimmon trees full of fruit by the roadside(I think of them as 'Halloween trees' because they look like little pumpkins growing on dead trees), and remembered that I haven't eaten any persimmons yet this season.

I quickly found them at the stand. They were priced from 200yen for four all the way up to 650yen for two. I paid 350yen for two, also mid-priced. I don't need fancy-schmancy persimmons just to satisfy a little craving. We'll leave those for the Iron Chefs, right?

Next, I went inside and it was amazing in there. There was this whole variety of Japanese fruits and veggies, so fresh, super cheap, plus lots of homemade pickled foods, which never seem to taste quite right when they come from the supermarket, so many kinds of locally grown green tea and other products like honey and barley, and at least half a dozen veggies that I still don't know how to use(working on it), and small and large local citrus fruits. I was shy about taking pictures, but I want to try next time I go. Maybe one of you detectives out there can tell me what veggies you see.

That nice trip aside, last night's big Halloween party at Ben's house, which actually _is_ across from a grove of mandarin orange trees and perhaps a Halloween tree or two, was fun. I went as a Chinese Pumpkin, wearing a Chinese-style dress with pumpkins all over it, and Hiro went as Darth Vader: helmet, cape, light saber, breathing apparatus and all. I taught him 'Luke, I am your father,' and he told me it went over very well with the foreign people he met through the night.

There were tons of people, 50 or 60, I think, in this house out in the countryside, out in the middle of nowhere. There were about half foreign people, half Japanese. Very mixed and friendly bunch.

It was all fun and games... until a friend of mine overdrank his tank and passed out badly. He was taken to the hospital and released at three this morning when we took him back to my house to sleep, way after the fun and games were over. He's seemingly fine now, but it wasn't so fun when all that was going on.

I wasn't feeling so hot for that and other reasons today, so after my Japanese lesson, I drove home instead of staying for Aikido and Jodo. It was not so bad, after all, because I came back early and the market stand was still open...