Today was a decidedly light day. In the morning when I got up I had some coffee with Mike while watching TV. I had told my cousin that I needed some items because the TSA had confiscated a few of them for security purposes. So the first thing we did was go to Walgreens to replace the items that were taken from me. The arrangement of the store was different than the Walgreens I normally go to in California so it took me a few minutes to find where each item was located.
After Walgreens we decided to have a small breakfast at a bakery shop downtown. The place was very cool – it had refrigerators full of different pastries and cakes for you to choose from. I selected a croissant filled with spinach, cheese and chicken. The cashier even baked it for be so it was warm for me to eat. The croissant was airy and tasted very fresh. I had also ordered a genmaicha tea (green tea with toasted rice) but was only able to finish half of it because it was a huge mug. We headed towards a few shops in downtown Eugene afterwards.
The first shop we went to was a record store where I casually browsed while my cousin looked for some new music to buy. Unlike some music stores the focus of this store is mostly on vinyl records as opposed to compact discs. I was struck at all the different forms of music available. They had rock, r&b, jazz, world music, reggae and everything else in between. After my cousin had selected a few albums he purchased them at the front of the store. I offered to buy him one of the albums he selected as sort of a belated birthday present, so I picked out one of the albums and bought it for him.
The next store we visited was called “Hollywood Antiques.” It was called this because the store was a former Hollywood Video rental store and they simply modified the signage on the front of the store to change the video in the name to antiques. This store had virtually anything under the sun. It had anything from gardening equipment to decorative plates. I quickly gravitated towards the used license plates. I have a small assortment of these plates at home and am always looking to expand my collection. They had some interesting ones at a reasonable price so I had purchased some of the plates. The cashier dealed on the prices of each plate so I bought them for even less than I originally was going to pay. I was pretty happy about that.
We headed to Junction City to pick up my cousin’s girlfriend’s brother at his house. He was to come a long with us tomorrow to see the Oregon coast and stay at my cousin’s for the night. However upon arriving at the house he had told us he needed to wait for one of his parents to come back home because he was looking over a dog that needed some attention. While waiting for his parents we threw a football to each other in the street in front of his house. One of the parents had arrived and we headed to get some lunch/dinner in town. We settled upon a Mexican restaurant, which was adjacent to a “Scandinavian Cultural Center.” I found the juxtaposition of the Mexican place next to a Scandinavian center funny for some reason. The food was very good at the Mexican restaurant. I had got tacos al pastor, which were marinated pork tacos along with a side of rice and beans. The others simply ordered tacos.
We all drove back to Eugene to my cousin’s house where we remained for the rest of the evening. My cousin’s girlfriend’s brother made us some mojitos, which he is very good at and played some video games. Tomorrow we are off to the Oregon coast for a day!
