Shopping cart catharsis

So not too much excitement this week. I'm still getting used to my bike and I'm trying really hard not to run anyone over, because I've heard that's considered a bad thing. I've decided to try and save a little money by cooking more of my own food and now with the basket on my bike, transporting groceries from the super market to my apartment has been made a helluva lot easier! I still feel a little lost when food shopping sometimes. It always reminds me of when I was little and I had this book about a man who couldn't read... I think it might have been called "The Man Who Couldn't Read". It was about an illiterate man whose wife always did the grocery shopping, but then she went on a trip (or she might have died) and left him alone to shop for himself. When he went to the store he made all these mistakes like buying soap flakes instead of oatmeal and shoe polish instead of whipped cream... okay I made the shoe polish example up, but I bet about 2 seconds ago you were all thinking 'How the hell could you possibly confuse shoe polish and whipped cream?' so haha, I fooled you all and I made myself laugh in the process, so yay. ANYWAY, what I was really getting at was that I feel like the poor little illiterate man, because I can't read the labels on about 75% of the products. Now, it doesn't take a brain surgeon to figure out when I'm in the fish section, but it sure would be nice to know what kind of fish I'm looking at. Right now the only one I can recognize based on just physical appearance is salmon and while salmon is delightful, it might get old after a couple of weeks. There are also a number of bottled spices and other substances that I might consider purchasing if I had a clue what they were. At this point I have taught myself the katakana character set, which is one of 3 character sets that the Japanese use to read and write. Katakana consists of 46 letters, almost twice the number of letters in the English alphabet, but they are all phonetic so that's a good thing. The other reason that I decided to learn katakana as opposed to hirigana, the other character set that consists of letters, is that katakana is used mainly to spell out foreign (mostly English) words, so if I can sound it out, usually I can figure it out. When I'm not trying to figure out what stuff is I actually do enjoy grocery shopping, it's actually kind of a cathartic experience for me. I haven't really been under a lot of stress lately , but I still like just being able to relax and wander around the store at my own pace.

Speaking of relaxation, this weekend I'm going with some friends to an onsen, a Japanese hot spring. I'm pretty excited, because everyone seems to love onsen, but I'm also slightly freaked out because most onsen require full nudity. Now, we are separated by gender so it's not really THAT big a deal, but still, I have never been naked in public and stripping down in front of some lovely thin Japanese girls is not exactly my idea of a great time. I'm actually hoping that there will just be some gross old ladies or perhaps the one obese woman in Japan so that I can feel slightly less self conscious about my body. Either way, I am determined to try new things, even when they scare me or push me out of my comfort zone, and this is just one of those things, so I'm going to do it. I'll fill you in on how it goes after I get back on Sunday.