The grocery store

In the grocery store you can choose your own live fish to take home and eat. Colette makes lots of friends with her golden hair, I guess she was more interesting than the fish for this little boy. We saw a truck on the freeway with a big tank on the back which said live fish, Iguess they supply the grocery stores.
If you look closely you can see the 9800 yen price tag, roughly $100. These aren't for eating, but for gifts; grown in special glass containers, they keep for up to a year. Fruits are very expensive here, as aqre vegetables. They seem to care for their produce individually like in "Search for the Ware-rabbit" or something, the fruits are packaged individually in these little nets almost like crochetted sweaters made of styrofoam string. A peach usually costs over $3, and the bag of 4 carrots I bought today cost about the same. Limes are $1 each.
Here's Colette next to some packaged octopus. One of the students gave us octopus dumplings, they tasted much like squid I've had before, pretty rubbery.

I went grocery shopping today while Nicolle was teaching, using the bike which has a sort of baby seat in the back which I strapped her into. It even has little mini handlebars for Colette to hold on to. She absolutely loves riding back there, but since we went in the middle of the day she got sleepy halfway there and zonked out, so I had to carry her and walk the bike the rest of the way. Our little part of town has many rice fields and tiny little roads divide them. Cars give bikes the right of way here so I feel much safer riding a bike than I would in the