melon juice and study books

Melon juice. We have a lot of it now, actually. This past Wednesday Takeshi had off so we decided to go check out one of the farmer's markets from a list he'd gotten from work. Seems that Restuarant Eve supports and/or buys from many of the nearby markets in the area, and I was hoping we'd be able to find one again. I didn't know if we'd be able to find a farmer's market within a convenient distance from where we live. So we got there and it was significantly smaller than the one we'd favor up in Lancaster, but it had good sells there. Mostly fruits and veggies, with one stand selling homemade icecream (I was very tempted...), and a couple more selling poultry and dairy, flowers and such.

We bought some carrots, plums, cherry tomatoes, and I picked a yellow melon. Which they said was "seedless" - but it wasn't. Psh. I was hoping, having it being seedless and all, that we could just slice it up and all - but in the end decided to make juice out of it. Oh boy did I get a lot of juice. Almost 64 ounces of it. I hope I don't get too sick of drinking it, since I have to use all of it up now! And the stuff is pretty well sweet on it's own, so no sugar is needed.









After watching GaijinWife's vid of Shou and Marina's metcha-cute, chu-fest, I want to really begin to seriously study Japanese again. Even though I wish I could pay for classes somewhere for this instead, a fire has been lit in my belly sort-of-speak, so maybe I can talk to my MIL on the phone next time we ring them! Sometime, maybe I could talk to Takeshi about doing some speak-only-in-Japanese days. It's true what GaijinWife also said in a reply on her blog, that one needs to live in Japan for a bit to be able to work on becoming fluent (or at least better at conversational Japanese!). Time to open up my many many Japanese-study books. :) I find that most of the time I'm better at writing sentences and such in Japanese, but that won't do me any good with actually talking to people. Lol.

Random photos:


really cool spice and tea shop in Old Town Alexandria







Whole Foods Market in town. It's so nice to have one of these nearby again!







Old Town Alexandria views. Only about 12 minutes from us.







Unique, quirky coffeehouse called "Misha's" in Old Town. Their coffee is SO fresh. Very different taste than any coffee I've ever had. I couldn't help but think of Khea and Missha when I saw this place!