Listen to the Rain

Usually when Anime Chicago has an event, only one of us can go, or (more often) neither of us can go. But yesterday when Laila was out at the grandparents, Anime Chicago had a dinner and chat event at Gangnam Market in River West, so after I was done with work we took the Red Line and a bus the ~hour out. We were late, thanks to the CTA, but we did get there.

We went to a similar event around six months ago and I remember the food being very good--I got some kind of donburi at the time--but that wasn't the case this time. But, I'm getting ahead of myself. The first thing that happened after we checked in was that we walked over to the restaurants and ran into worldbshiny! She had had a bad day at work and come in to get ramen, which she recommended to me, and we chatted a bit about her day before we left to get food. I say "left" but worldbshiny was sitting less than a meter from the restaurants, and sashagee went a bit further away to Gangnam Taco while I turned around to go to the Seven-Faced Bird (from the Japanese for turkey, 七面鳥, shichimenchō). worldbshiny recommended the ramen so that's what I got, plus a kara-age bao, and sat down at a nearby table:




Unfortunately, we were both a bit disappointed. My ramen wasn't bad, but it wasn't good either. The broth was great and the ground turkey they put at the bottom was a nice surprise, but the noodles were a little too squishy (when I told this to worldbshiny later she said she gets her ramen without noodles). Meanwhile, sashagee thought her tacos were bland and too small, just not really worth buying at all. I heard other people later say that they weren't too satisfied either, which is disappointing because I remember it being more delicious last time.

After eating, sashagee really wanted to hit the gacha machines, so we got $20 worth of tokens (ten tokens and each pull takes more than one token because gacha is a scam). I was going to do one pull on the Kirby machines but despite all the available machines, both Kirby machines were totally sold out. One of them even had three possible Kirbys out of the four results! I can see why it was sold out, but come on. I had to (sashagee demanded I pull at least one thing for myself) pull the That Time I Got Reincarnated As a Slime and won a crowned Rimuru that now lives on my desk. sashagee got some Hello Kitty toys, including a dessert-themed Pompompurin that's in a pudding cup that we immediately had to pick up and put out of Laila's reach because we knew she would gravitate to it (which she did). sashagee's gacha addition thus satisfied, we split up. I spent most of the time talking to mhhilker about video games and our respective Passovers before someone mentioned that the grocery store was going to close soon, so sashagee loaded up on mochi, udon, dorayaki, and various other things that are a bit harder to get in the Asian markets close to us, and when we had paid, we went back to the food court and said our goodbyes.

While we were walking to the bus stop, an autonomous food delivery drone whizzed by on the sidewalk.