Day Forty-Three: "Silver Lining"

This is the port of Yokohama as seen from the iconic Yamashita Park (the makeout capital of the greater Tokyo region, no less). In the foreground is the Hikawa-Maru, and the background is the Minatomirai area. This is where I drove out to for an hour to have my afternoon snack on Saturday.

Why did I go so far just to have my fruit yoghurt? Parking fail. The previous weekend I drove and made a Costco-run in addition to going to the studio for training and it all seemed fine and easy enough. This Saturday, I planned to go back to taking the train, but I lost track of time while prepping my lunch, snacks and dinner so I opted to take the car. I should have been there with plenty of time to spare, but the whole Motomachi/Chinatown area where the studio was located was packed with people. Turns out there was a big sale on called the---wait for it--- Charming Sale. Patrick says some people come from three hours away to hunt for bargains. So the entire area was packed. There are really only narrow one-way streets to begin with, and the van in front of me took the last parking spot. I drove the only direction I could, back to the main road, and hung a left in order to loop back around. Mistake there. Turning left took me straight through a tunnel, up a hill, and on some road way in the wrong direction. By the time I got back around to near the studio, there was still no parking and it was almost half an hour after the session started. So, I decided to forget about it and join Brian for a session on Sunday instead.

Now the old me probably would have been angry and stressed out in my car, but I figured there wasn't much I could do about it, so I drove to the nearby park and sat on the bench to enjoy my snack. I love the sea in general so it was quite a pleasant half hour.

Then I drove over to Kawasaki to the IMAX theater to watch The Green Hornet in 3D IMAX. My girlfriend came out from Tokyo to join me. My recommendation? Don't do it. At least for that movie. Maybe for Rapunzel in a few weeks? Actually it was a really nice cinema though. And by train, it's fairly easy to get there from Nakameguro or Shibuya. Again, getting into the parking lot due to one-way roads, barriers, etc., around the station is not easy. Driving in Tokyo? Just don't do it, I guess. Save it for the countryside trips.

Got home a little after 10pm and the gym was closed so did the exercises in my apartment. Not ideal, but doable in a pinch. It was good that I had done the jumprope first thing in the morning along with an 8-mintue abs session. Oh well. The silver lining was that I sat at a nice, different spot to have my snack, managed to catch a movie and discover a good cinema, found that I wasn't upset about the whole thing and the wasting of time (the normal perfectionist in me would have been very angry at myself), and I discovered that in a pinch, I could work out just fine at home.

And now the reason why I ended up scrambling to get to Yokohama in time. Lunch, of course!

Oven-roasted chicken

Red quinoa

Tomato, avocado, green bean, onion, mushroom sauteed and simmered down to a sauce with the excellent home-made salt-substitute mixed in.

And put it all together.

The sauce with the salt-substitute mixed in is great. It tastes every bit as flavorful as a tomato sauce made with salt. In fact, I think it tastes better. I think there is potential to make lots of pure-veggie pasta sauces using this stuff mixed in. Only two days from the half-way point!