Healthy Juice
In the afternoon after visiting the beach, Y and I played tennis. She called her friend U from her mobile phone and asked him to play with us. U, a young Spanish man, was professional tennis coach. Needless to say, he was an excellent tennis player. He showed us some of his secret (?) skills, such as hitting ball under his crotch or behind his back.
We played tennis for about an hour under the dazzling afternoon sun. After that, U told us that he had to go, as he had an appointment for someone’s tennis lesson. After U left, Y asked me to go to drink "healthy juice" together. I agreed.
There is one "juice stand" at almost
every corner in LA. We drove to one of those. There was a counter in the shop and
above the counter a menu hung. "Celery, Carrot and Apple",
"Apple, Mango and
Without being adventurous, I ordered a juice of the most conservative combination "Celery, Carrot and Apple". Y ordered "Carrot, Spinach and some other ingredients". When I looked at how juice was made, I found that no water was added at all. Therefore, in order to make a full big cup of juice, five or six carrots had to be thrown into the juicer. It meant that a cup of carrot juice was equivalent to five or six raw carrots. It was very healthy!
"Celery, Carrot and Apple" juice was quite tasty because of sweet taste of carrot and apple with the crispy aroma of celery. Y’s juice contained spinach. Because it was a mixture of green spinach and red carrot, in other words, because it was a combination of complementary colours in the colour circle, the colour of her juice was very difficult to describe. I daresay that the colour was quite similar to an old and worn-out wagon of a dark red Hankyu train. Y allowed me to have a sip of her juice. I groaned. It was an indescribable taste!
A couple of days later, Y and I went to another juice shop. There was a machine, which looked like a small-sized minced meat maker, on the counter. Something like green grass was placed in a glass case next to the machine. I recalled a Japanese radish sprout "kaiwaredaikon" because it was grown on the wet sponge. But the grass itself seemed similar to grass grown in everyone’s garden. Y told me that it will be squeezed by the ‘mini minced-meat machine’ so people could drink it.
Coincidently, a woman walked into the shop to order juice from this “green grass”. The young shopkeeper started cutting grass by using a knife and thrusting the grass into the “mini minced-meat machine”. Soon, green juice started dripping from the other side of the machine. The juice was caught by a tiny plastic glass, which was almost the same size as a Japanese sake cup. Although a considerably large quantity of grass was fed into the machine, only a small cup full juice was produced. The woman, who ordered it, gulped down the juice with no emotion on her face.
According to a story that U told, one of his friends, also a tennis coach, drank this green juice and got some parasites in his stomach. At the restroom, he was surprised to see a worm coming out from his bottom and ran to the doctor with the worm. I thought there was no surprise in him getting parasites as he had been eating grass.