"Can I have some more water please? My hair drank most of it."

If you ask me what I want to eat on any given day, the answer is likely to be pasta. So has been the case for most of my birthdays, when I am granted the birthday-girl-right of choosing the meal. This one, in this way, is no exception. Luckily I had a bottle of alfredo sauce that the world's most excellent mother had had a company that ships foreign food to hungry, lonely, foreigners in Japan to this particular lonely, hungry foreigner. I put that on elbow noodles

There was also the important birthday dessert to plan. I'm not a huge cake fan - I'll usually pick pie if I have a choice. But cakes in Japan come in these tiny one-person types, heavy on the fruit and light on the disliked-frosting. I thought I'd pick one of those up - but there are none at the local supermarket. It must be a specialist store thing. All they did have were these "cream" roll cakes. "Cream" flavor is prevalent here, and I wonder when the public is going to figure out it's a codeword for "no flavor." I bought one for my homestay family when I went to them and it was so disappointing that I was surprised they didn't kick me out again. So I finally just went with fruit. Now, fruit in Japan can be an expensive proposition. There are melons specially wrapped for gift-giving that can be over a hundred dollars, and there are news stories about those that are auctioned for thousands. I looked at a couple in the teens, but I'm not sure I could consume even a small melon on my own - so I just got a fruit bowl for 400 yen. It wasn't the best I've had but it was still better than my usual banana diet. And obviously, meant for a party as it had several fancy toothpicks.

So that was my birthday dinner! I also hope to go shopping this weekend and treat myself to something.