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I bought a neat melon soda cell phone strap. It has bubbly stuff in there that floats around and makes it look like soda!


These tissue packs are so cute. I have a cute tissue pack cover, but I didn't use it with these. :)


I bought some stuffed animals at Nandemo Kaimasu, another used store in Iwata. I got all of these for about 500 yen I think. The big Tofu is my favorite! The Pikachu on the left is kind of weird looking (I only got that one because it was packaged together with the other Pokemon) but it turns inside out and zips up into a Pokeball, so it's actually pretty neat. That Pikachu and the two Nyanpire plushies are in my car now.


I got these other stuffed animals for my car a while back at Pick Up. A lot of people have stuffed animals in their cars here. So cute! The one on the right is tofu and I think the one on the left is maybe supposed to be pudding.


This alpaca is soooooo cute! It had blushed cheeks, but those mostly faded away.



The bags came from Seria. I had Hello Kitty ones before I bought these.


I painted my nails before climbing Mt. Fuji. They were supposed to look like the snowy top of Mt. Fuji (except it doesn't look that way in the summer) but they didn't really turn out exactly how I imagined. I still really liked them, but they were more just pretty snowy winteryness.


I drank that Pocari Sweat on Mt. Fuji. The change in air pressure did this.


I think I saw this train in Hiroshima. I didn't ride it, but I was amused by the decorations on the front.




Sometimes when I stay at Toyoko Inn I get random free stuff and I usually don't know what it is. I've gotten this stuff several times. "I can't join the party due to ugly body." What? Lol.


I couldn't remember if I had posted this random glue stick or not on here. There's nothing wrong with this English, but it's just random.



This is on the side of a vending machine near my apartment. Haha.


During the summer, there were a bunch of lotus growing not too far from Jonathan's apartment.


I saw this really awesome bag at the mall, but it's HUGE and I don't know what I would ever use it for. I wished they had a smaller one that I could use for groceries. Then, last time I was there they did have one in the size I wanted, but it was actually more expensive. The big one is like 1200 and the smaller one is 1300. It's more expensive because it has extra pockets and stuff.


So cute! The name of these cat treats are so funny and adorable.


One afternoon the clouds were sooooo super fluffy and pretty!


This is the Ichino Aeon mall in Hamamatsu. It doesn't look that special from the outside, but it's amazing. It's the best mall I've ever been to! It has a bunch of super cute clothing stores, including Axes Femme (my favorite!), a Seria 100 yen shop, a pet store with cute kittens and puppies, a Sanrio store, a couple stores just filled with tons of cute character merchandise, a bookstore, a small import grocery store, a Uniqlo, some good shoe stores, an arcade, a hobby store with puzzles, and a lot more! The Aeon store is a big department store that sells a ton of stuff including groceries. They have Nutella! :) Oh and in addition to the grocery store, there is a ton of food in the mall. Delicious ramen, Mister Donut, Subway, crepes, and soooooo much more. I saw a place there that sells these apple ring pastry things that look really good. Oh and Starbucks has some sort of almond frappuccino right now that I really want to try.



I found a really tiny can of Coke in the Aeon grocery store!


I bought some really cute Hello Kitty pasta there and made soup. Yum! I just boiled the pasta in water with chicken consomme cubes and added vegetables, red pepper, and garlic.


I bought a chocolate madeleine mix at Seria. They were pretty good, but a little bland, but I expected that with a 100 yen mix. Frosting them with Nutella and adding sprinkles made them delicious though. :) The mix worked very well in my toaster oven.

We had a typhoon last weekend. I got up in the night and it was pretty windy, but nothing too crazy. It sounded like it was raining hard, but when I looked outside it was just the wind making it sound that way. It rained a lot in other areas though and caused flooding.

The typhoon also brought some cooler weather. The other night I got a little cold as I walked to the konbini, but I was in short sleeves and I get cold super easily so it wasn't really that cold. But it feels like summer is ending and fall is beginning.

I have a few fun things planned for fall. In a couple weeks I'm going to a Backstreet Boys concert! Hehe! In late November Jonathan and I are running a 10k in Iwata. I've never done anything over a 5k so it should be interesting. I did 8k the other day with a bit of walking and it wasn't too bad.

I also signed up to take the JLPT in December. I'm going to take the N4 level. There are five levels. 1 is the hardest and 5 is the easiest. I looked over some practice tests the other day and I did ok. I still need to study a bit, but I think I have a chance of passing.

I have a three day weekend now but I don't have anything special planned. I'll probably end up at the mall at some point. If the weather is nice maybe I'll go for a bike ride.

I have so many random posts and I can't ever think of what to call them, haha. I have quite a few photos from July up until now. I'm splitting them into two posts. This one will have all the food photos and the next post will be everything else.

The picture above is of the candy I bought at Candy Show Time in Tokyo.


Star Wars Pocky! There was also Darth Vader packaging but the flavors were the same. The pink was strawberry, the green was green tea, and I'm not sure what the purple was.



A teacher at school gave me these green tea chocolates. I thought the pattern was neat.


These chocolates were filled with lemon ginger, sweet pineapple, pineapple mix, and mango passion fruit creams. They were pretty good, but I wasn't amazed. 


Mister Donut had banana flavored donuts for a little while. Well, at least the icing was banana flavored. They were soooo tasty! The banana shaped one was Jonathan's.


That's a coffee jelly (like coffee flavored Jell-o) parfait I got at the grocery store. Mmmm! 


The night of my last day of school I studied for the driving test. I had Snickers and a peach soda. It turns out that I wasted my time studying for the test. The written test was ridiculously easy. At least I had tasty snacks!


The next day I passed the written test but failed the driving test. I went shopping in Hamamatsu afterwards. I got glittery pens, glittery nail polish, and yummy Smurfs candy! :)


Fruit ninja!


This Mt. Fuji bread came from the grocery store. I expected it to be sweet, but it wasn't except for the chocolate chips. It wasn't bad, but it didn't seem dessert-ish enough.


This variety pack had chocolate mint Aero, Cookies and Cream Kit Kat, and Caramel Nestle Crunch bars. The Aero bars were my favorite. I was thinking recently that I haven't seen as many interesting Kit Kats this time, but I just saw bags of Pumpkin Pudding Kit Kats at the grocery this afternoon. I don't want to buy a whole bag but hopefully I'll find some single bars at the konbini or something.


Gourmet Doritos? Lol. These were Pepper Salami flavored. They were good, but not a flavor I would buy again.


The Smoked Bacon Doritos sounded awesome, but they were actually terrible. Well, not so bad that I couldn't eat them, but they tasted like bacon bits.


I couldn't get cranberry juice in Toi so I'm glad to find it here! 


 Yes! It's was wonderful out of a rectangular bottle! It just wouldn't have been as good otherwise!


Ahhhh! Kaldi (a small import grocery store in the mall) had Inca Kola! It's a soft drink popular in Peru. We were both very excited and it was delicious as always! A few weeks ago I bought the last one on the shelf and I haven't seen it again since.


I wasn't sure what to expect with caramel flavored potato chips, but they were really good. I will probably buy these again if I see them again. 


These mango chocolates were really good. They had a little bit of crispy stuff inside them. 


Despite the hideous character on the bottle, Pear Fanta was good. 


Someone on Facebook posted an awesome recipe and I tried it. I mixed one pack of pancake mix with an egg and juice from a can of mixed tropical fruit. I put the mixed fruit in the bottom of the rice cooker and poured the batter over it. I then cooked it in the rice cooker. It was so tasty and it was super easy! I will try this with different types of canned fruit. I think peaches would be good.


Tully's has an espresso shake and it's amazing. 


Breakfast varies at Toyoko Inn, but this is pretty typical. Potato salad for breakfast is awesome. I always miss the breakfast after vacation is over.


Such cute tea packaging! 


Mmm! This kiwi soda was yummy! :)

My summer vacation is over and my first day back to school was this past Monday. I wasn't looking forward to going back to school after having 46 days in a row off (counting weekends), but it wasn't too bad.

This post is out of order because I was excited to post about more exciting things that I did, but the day before climbing Fujisan (in early August), Jonathan and I visited the Shizuoka Prefectural Forest Park in Hamamatsu.

We wanted to either visit the park or ride bikes that day and we decided to go the park since we didn't want to tire ourselves out before climbing Mt. Fuji.

The road to the park was winding and narrow but very pretty!

We took a trail to go the suspension bridge.

 I forget the exact height, but the suspension bridge is pretty high up! It's neat! :)




After the bridge we continued the hike for a little bit and it was actually pretty steep in parts. It was more of a hike than we expected and I think a bike ride would have been less tiring, haha. There are more trails there that I would like to check out sometime. I want to go back in the fall when the weather is cooler.

This has nothing to do with the Forest Park, but last night we had a thunderstorm! Last time I was in Japan I only saw one thunderstorm and it lasted like two minutes. It wasn't much except for the lightning that struck very close to my apartment and knocked out the electricity for about ten seconds. I also saw lightning in the distance a couple of times but it never amounted to much. But the storm last night was very strong. I was woken up suddenly by really loud thunder. I don't know if it was raining much or very windy, but the lightning was crazy. The thunder was SOOOO loud and lightning stuck very close several times. The thunder was really shaking my apartment. It was so loud that I jumped several times. I was excited that there was a thunderstorm but it was actually a little scary.

This past week I saw lightning several nights. A few times when walking back to my car from Jonathan's apartment we saw lightning in the distance but didn't hear any thunder. One night it stormed a little bit later on and there was quite a bit of lightning but it wasn't super close. I thought it rarely stormed here, but I guess it's more common than I thought. It's still not usually as strong as the storms I see in Kentucky, but the one last night was pretty crazy!