antique bakery

i've fallen in love with the series called "antique bakery", a japanese dorama based on the manga with the same name. at first it doesn't seem interesting. it was a pain to watch really, what with the patchy/rough subs that i got with the copy and it's peppered with certain quiet moments that i know somehow are supposed to mean something but i didn't manage to quite get. well anyway it was a good thing that my friend emilie also lent me the first volume of the manga, more details were revealed and i understood the story better and got to appreciate the dorama finally. i tried to listen more and finally understood the dialogues on my own and read less of the subs too, so that helped. there are four main characters but what's fun is the story does not revolve only on them nor just the baking of cakes either. it's different from all the cooking or sports based series i've seen before. yes, i did get to learn a lot about cakes but that wasn't the main focus either, nor were the love lives of the four main guys. it's more of their interactions with their customers and the people around them and how they react to situations. every so often a new character is introduced, either somebody from their past or one of their regular customers who has an interesting story that accounts for their quirky behavior.

if i ever get to japan, i want to go to that park with a lot of steps (the place where eiji ate a cake with that jilted woman and where kage ate cake with his daughter hideko), i wonder where exactly it is.
fave ep: where a kid in the hospital, for some reason, kept requesting a star cake from her mom but keeps on rejecting the cakes that were brought in. i loved eiji here... and this ep got me crying buckets ^^;

akemashite omedeto

it's the new year and i just came from a friend's place who invited me for dinner. i was waiting for my brother to pick me up. i looked up at the sky and about a million stars winked back at me. the sky was gorgeous! it has been a long time since i've seen the sky like this. this was one of the things i dearly miss about going home in the province. looking up at that great expanse.... i was a kid again. flat on my back atop the water reservoir at home... dreaming of becoming an astronaut one day, donning a space suit and seeing one of the planets up close.