Respect the Eldery Day and Gyoza

Today is "Respect the Elderly Day". It is a holiday for most of Japan but since Tetsu works at a convalescent home, of course it is a busy day for him. Families will be coming to visit their elderly parents, speeches will be given and some sort of program is offered. Unfortunately, Tetsu was called away at 3:00am this morning and he went to the home for a few hours, came back at 6:00 and slept on the sofa until 7:30 and now is back at the convalescent home dressed in a suit to speak with residents' families.

I'd feel guilty playing around with Tetsu working so hard on a holiday so I decided to wax some of my floors. It is a nice sunny day. It is still hot. The floors haven't been waxed for a year (because in spring when I usually do them we were pulling ourselves together after the earthquake and later I wasn't able to crawl around on the floor.) I am able to crawl around on the floor again so I have moved furniture from the entrance and the dining room and given the floors a first waxing. I'll let them sit awhile before doing the second coat... I have a feeling I won't get to the living room floor today. Too much furniture! Too much crawling around!

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Yesterday afternoon, Tetsu and I attended a Gyoza Matsuri... Pot stickers Festival! The neighboring city is famous for its Chinese pot stickers and whenever we go out to eat Chinese ramen noodles we always order gyoza. I'm pretty good at making my own though it takes a lot of time. And I have a favorite place where I can buy handmade frozen gyoza, so you can see we eat a lot of gyoza! But yesterday we surpassed our usual consumption.

There must have been 10 or 15 gyoza booths at the festival, all famous brand names in our part of Japan and each booth was selling 4 gyoza for 200 yen... about $2.50. Yum! Delicious! Each shop has its own specialty, its own special sauce, its own way of making gyoza.

Some wrappers were sticky, some transparent, some were stuffed with more vegetables than meat, some used a lot of garlic. Though vinegar and soy sauce are the most common sauce for gyoza, some sauces used red peppers, some used miso.

We tried so many! Do I dare admit that I ate 24 gyoza yesterday?! Yes, I did! Stuffed!!!


There was no need to eat dinner last night, that's for sure!

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Back to waxing the floors! I need to work off some of yesterday's gyoza!