I didn't think the daughter would be coming back home for her birthday, but it turned out that she'd "forgotten" that she was supposed to meet a university friend who was visiting Hiroshima that weekend. And so she suddenly turned up on Friday, saw her friend on Saturday, and stayed long enough to be treated to a birthday dinner on Sunday evening before returning to Nagoya on Monday.
And so it was that we went to our favourite local restaurant to celebrate her 23rd birthday. The restaurant, "Italia Ryori Bacca," opened about 14 years ago, when my daughter was 9 years old and a bit shy when out of the house. That soon changed and the following summer she got me to invite the restaurant owners and some of the regulars to join us on a camping trip to Miyajima! So you could say the couple who run the restaurant have seen my daughter grow up, so it was a happy reunion when we took her there last weekend for the first time in a couple of years.
It was fun to share a drink or two, or three, together too. We started off with a cleansing Sapporo draft beer before switching to carafes of various Italian white wines. After each carafe I'd ask if she'd like another and the answer was of course not a straight "Yes, please," but,
"Areba nomu."
That is to say,
If [wine] were there, [I'd] drink it,
which is perhaps the Japanese equivalent of the British,
I don't mind if I do.
And so I ordered another carafe. I forget the specifics of the wines we went through, but they were all northern Italian white wines that went down a treat.
Cheers!
DH