I asked Patrick, Kazue and Joel what todays' highlight was. They said:

P: That 4-year old in a sweater vest with a receding hairline scaring his playmates in the playground on the roof of the mall (which is where we went after getting our obanyaki - shown in photo above).

K: Bicycle gang of Yokohama (which is how we refer to ourselves, biking all over the city and ringing our bike bells repeatedly. We're very dangerous. Also, Kazue's bell is in the shape of a tea pot and is the cutest bell you've ever seen. So dangerous.) 

J: Doing Kung Fu in the park (which is how Joel started the day - with Patrick. While Kazue and I kicked off the day two hours of yoga.)

Here's the rest of our day in photos:

We started the day with Japanese buffet. The food was delicious - comforting and memory-inducing for me. Took me back to my days teaching in the elementary schools. Remind me to tell you how it went over at the beginning of the year when I told them I don't eat meat. 

Back on the rord again, we did a small bit of shopping.

We found a tea shop called Lupicia and got three kinds of tea. A green tea with chestnut (it was the number one best-seller in the store), a red tea (rooibos) with caramel and rum undertones and Daruma, a black tea with pink pepper thrown in for fun. Will let you know how they go.

After that we went to my favorite store on the planet (this is not an understatement). MUJI. I can't tell you how much I love this store. I wish I could live in a MUJI store. For a year. (MUJI means "no mark, good quality" - mark = logo. And the character for "mu" means empty. So...beyond awesome. It was the first store I asked about when I first came to Japan in 2003.)

After MUJI we rode about three miles back home for pasta.

Mata, ne!

(As I was about to hit "publish" Kazue told me, "Now there is a MUJI house." And I looked it up. And, unbelievable though it is, you can now live in a MUJI house. A-ma-zing.)