A Little Drive

 Hannah had to go to the special needs school this afternoon. I thought it was for her teacher training there in November but it isn't, it's for two days of volunteer work she has to do in December.  She was going to get the train but David said he would drive her as he doesn't have work tonight. I decided to go with them as I know David is tired, I can't drive but I can keep him awake. By car, it's about 20 minutes, by train 40 minutes!

Hannah is exhausted from yesterday,  nursery in the morning, afternoon in the city for university and to visit a junior high school, then back home and to the cram school for another 3 hours of work.  All that in 35C weather, kind of crazy. I think David felt sorry for her and that is why he offered to take her.

After we dropped off Hannah, David and I went shopping! 

At the moment rice is difficult to come by, so my plan is if there is rice in the store I'll buy some. Apparently, it was too hot last year so the harvest was bad.  I'm wondering if this is going to be an ongoing problem, not just rice but other food products as well.  

The first store we went into had no rice!

empty shelves

just 5 bags of 3 kilos rice

I've seen this on the news but those were stores in Tokyo or Osaka, kind of normal for the bigger cities. This was in the countryside!  

We drove back toward home and spotted another store.  I like this store but it's a bit more expensive than where I usually shop. I thought we should just have a look.  They had rice, good brand and not too expensive. They also had a big sign saying only one bag per family!  We eat rice almost every day, it's easy to do. I guess I'll have to figure out some meals that don't use rice and see if we can stretch out what rice we have for a few weeks!

I tried to take a video of the drive, just a minute or so. Ignore David making funny noises!

This is very typical of where we live now.  Not really the countryside but not the city either.  Drugstore Mori is a good store, I was going to go in there but changed my mind as I wanted to see if the other store had any fruits! It did but very expensive, a bunch of grapes was over 1000 yen, about 5 pounds!

view from the second store

I love how right next to two big stores there's a bamboo grove. There was a little breeze, just watching the bamboo sway made me feel a little bit cooler!!