Radio Nagasaki - The Thirtieth!

Every day on my way home from work, I listen to the radio in the car.  It's kind of a cool-down exercise for my brain, because I can just listen all in Japanese but not be expected to respond, so my brain's not on it's toes the whole time.  But there's a soundclip they play sometimes between segments that says in very clear American-sounding English "Radio Nagasaki...the ____." Except I NEVER catch the last word.  It's either 30th, dirtiest, earliest, girliest, or it's not in English and my brain's just not expecting it.  But I also always forget to turn the radio up when that sound byte starts.

Anyway, I say all that to say this: usually when that clip plays, I'm just passing the entrance to this shrine.  It's hard to see in this photo, but the entrance is the little stone gate straight across the crosswalk.  Every time I hear "Radio Nagasaki...The Thirtieth!" I think "Oh yeah, I need to visit that shrine sometime."  So today I finally did.  You cross this road, walk down a little hill, up some stairs, and then you walk up a bunch more stairs, then cross a stone bridge over the highway, then up some really rickety stairs in the side of a mountain and at last at the top is a little shrine.  I meant to take a picture of the bridge and stairs, to show you how treacherous it was.  I had to use a leather whip to swing from one side to the other and I also had to outrun a giant boulder when it was time to leave, but the pictures I thought I took turned out to be pictures of my fingers.  But here's a pretty good couple of pictures of the shrine(s) at the top.

This one on the left had some bloody tufts of bird feathers laying on the steps, and after hearing about there being snakes in the area, even though today was super cold I ducked out pretty quickly.






What I originally set out to do today was photograph some of my favorite cabbage gardens.  As I've mentioned before, they're all over the place here.  For example, here's one:

I was also going to return something I purchased last week, and I thought the returning merchandise experience would allow for paragraphs and paragraphs of endless entertainment.  However, what happened was more like this:

Me: I bought this light last week and it doesn't actually work with my bike.

Clerk: Do you have the receipt?

Me:  Yes, here it is.

Clerk: Oh boy, that's just barely under one week.

Me: [chuckle]

Clerk: Ok, here you go.

Me: Thanks.

Two final notes on today's experiences.  1) I finally broke down and bought frozen pizza.  It's small.  My had is shown here for size comparison.  While you might not say this pizza would fit in the palm of my hand, you also might.  I bought a package of 3 pizzas for around $6.  It's no Totino's, but it's cheap for pizza in Japan.  Also, the flavor and texture of the crust was not exactly what I expected, and the sauce wasn't great.  I'm not a big fan of corn on pizza either.  And the pepperoni was definitely not real pepperoni (salami, at best).  Plus my toaster oven was JUST small enough that the one end of the pizza had to rest on the back of the oven and thus got burnt.  Otherwise, though, it was still pizza, and you can see it is pre-notched to show you how to cut it in 4 pieces.  All in all, I'd eat two within 10 minutes of each other and then wait 25 minutes and eat the third.  If it were up to me, that is.

2) You can buy individually packaged soft-serve ice cream cones in the freezer section in Japan.