Day 4.057: Rising to the challenge

Last night as I was going to bed I Skyped with the family. Well, Exile #3 was asleep after a sleepless night, but Exile #2, Exile #4 and E5N1 were having breakfast. I'm not sure how it happened, but soon E5N1 was challenge me to produce various sound effects. It started with innocent animal noises but got rather esoteric. "Make the sound of snow falling!" "Make the sound of M&Ms...falling down the stairs!"

Now I think about it, maybe he said Eminem - I could probably have rocked that!

Later in the morning I saw this comment from a regular reader. He set me a number of challenges. At lunchtime I grabbed an opportunity. My hosts took me back to the site of this:


(from my visit in 2008) and I once again enjoyed the green (and the good coffee).

And as the day wore to a close, I faced up to my own challenge and one of Tall_Guy's by ordering this:

...quite literally. Finding that my waitress and I shared only the language of pointing and smiling, I led her outside and pointed to this plastic replica of the meal that I wanted. After returning to the table, we had an animated discussion about which beer I wanted - but it was almost entirely devoid of actual communication. In the end a cold glass of beer arrived. Both the beer and the food were very good - much cheaper than anything in the hotel (they offer a BLT in the bar for only twice what I paid for all this food!) - and check gyoza of the list if you please!