Today was a really nice day. The weather wasn’t really good, but the day’s events made for a good time.

After a morning walk with Muffin and some breakfast, it was off to the matsu ura shu zo sake factory for their annual open house festival.

It may be my imagination, but it seems that their festival gets more popular every year. All the best to them, as I think they do the community a great service by having their festival.

My sake tasting skills were not at their best this morning. It may have something to do with the various shots of sake and shochu I had before the tasting contest or (could it be?) that my skill is indeed very low. We’ll never know, unless I do more and more testing of this hypothesis. If you’ve got sake, I’m willing to test my theory. But I digress.

After a wonderful time at the festival, I returned home and then attended the B級ご当地グルメフェスティバル (B Level Gourmet Food Festival) in Tokushima.

Pictured above is our lunch for today. At the bottom in the plastic container we have yakisoba, or fried noodles with vegetables. In the middle on the left is a sandwich filled with fried shitake mushrooms and bacon, and on the right there is barbequed chicken (that was supposed to be served with over rice with a special sauce, but the rice wasn’t ready and we were told me would have to wait from 5-10 minutes, so we passed; next time it would be better if they are better prepared). At the top is a bowl of soup with chicken balls, tomatoes and fish paste balls.

All the food was great and it was nice to have the opportunity to try some of the foods. B Level Gourmet Foods have really become famous in Japan because they are simple but delicious foods that are found all over the country. On TV there are shows that introduce these types of foods and restaurants and it always looks so delicious when we watch. Today it was great not only to watch the foods, but to actually taste them!

The evening ended with our family going for another walk with Muffin after dinner, enjoying each other’s company and getting a bit of exercise.

Here’s to Happy Days! Cheers!