Barely holding together

Lisa's parents arrived on Friday, in remarkably good spirits given that their plane was delayed approximately 22 times. Like all our visitors, their trip so far has been a whirlwind sweeping through Kobe and the greater Kansai area. Hundreds of temple tickets flitter around in the twister, along with the occasional "all you can eat" dinner receipt. If you listen carefully, just for a moment, you may hear some words carried on the howling winds:

God, my feet are sore.

We've discovered a burger place near our house which does Canadian burgers of all things. I think this means "burgers with ice hockey on the TV in the background". Having said that, we headed there on Thursday (to properly mark the endy of the no spendy weekendy) and it seemed to get the Canadian tick of approval from one of my coworkers and his wife. They make a mean maple-teriyaki sauce and it's a definite cure for overfishing (and over-ricing).

Friday, Lisa's folks arrived from Tokyo and I headed down to meet them after work. They managed to find their way around to some interesting sights while they were up there, which is more than I could say for myself. We had dinner at Ajiajia, everyone's favouritest restaurant in the whole world, and chatted about our plans for the weekend between mouthfuls of prawns and spring rolls. The staff there officially know us by name now, which shouldn't really surprise me. I expect my face to be embossed on a gold plate on the wall by the end of the year.

On Saturday we met early for breakfast and made the trip out to Kyoto to see some sights out there. We handed over 5000 yen for bus tickets and were given 8000 yen change, which was a very nice start to the day; everything continued smoothly from there. Stopping for the occasional graze rather than a sit down lunch, we managed to get around to Kiyomizu Temple (where we fanned as much healing incense on to Carol's broken arm as we could), the immaculate gardens of the gold and silver temples and Fushimi Inari. The latter is a temple on the side of a mountain with approximately eleventy gazillion closely packed torii gates stretching over it. It's kind of disconcerting walking through them - even though you're outside, they make such a dense tunnel that you'd swear you were indoors. We went up for a good way then decided to head back down for dinner, but not before Lisa had made friends with a little black kitten who spent most of their first meeting trying to squeeze under her bum.

For dinner, we eventually decided on the infamous "Ninja Restaurant", opting this time for the proper restaurant over the buffet. The food just kept coming - ninja star crackers, beautifully cooked meat and fish and "surprise eggs" that looked like eggs but were actually vegetables and seafood in jelly. The escargot was set on fire with "ninja magic", a quick burning fuse that set off a big fireball when it got to the end of the plate. It didn't stop there though - it leapt over on to my camera and started merrily burning away, but fortunately we managed to put it out before there was any damage done. We had a few visitors while we were there - the ninja soup man came in and set to chopping up bok choy with his scissors, then he pulled out a hot rock and dropped it into the pot to set it bubbling away. While we were eating that, the ninja magician came in to shock and amaze with fire and card tricks. I kept my camera well away this time. Dessert was just as impressive - cheesecake frogs on chocolate lily pads as well as ice cream and sugared pretzels done up like a little bonsai tree. All up it was a great day but we were all dead on our feet by the time we finished up. Strangely, I managed to sleep on the train on the way back but not in my bed when I got home - I probably should have bought an all you can ride ticket and just stayed on there.

In the morning we met up with one of my coworkers who had volunteered to drive us around for a day to see some of the hard to get to sights. Unfortunately it was belting down with rain, but that was a good excuse to buy some nice umbrellas to replace the scabby ones we have at home. We got to Himeji and had a walk through the castle first, looking up at the massive scaffolding that now covers the whole thing and hearing stories of women being tossed unceremoniously into wells within the grounds. Next, we went to a Japanese garden nearby and took part in a tea ceremony, then in a puzzling development, Ken managed to win himself a pot plant by making a spinning top out of an acorn and getting it to spin for almost 30 seconds. We braved the rain for a full 9 Japanese gardens before retreating to the car and heading to our next stop - a fish market in Akashi. Ken was awfully pleased, chatting to all the vendors about what each fish was called in Western Australia and being blown away by how much cheaper everything was. At one stand the fish were still flapping; at another a guy holding a live octopus had to keep peeling its suckers off his hand. Dried octopus hung up at random intervals, stretched out flat like weird looking bats. By the time we got down the other end of the market we were the full bottle on fish and what to do with them. We hopped in the car and headed to the Akashi bridge museum, which is actually inside the bridge just under where the cars drive over. It was almost typhoon-like by this stage as we rushed to the door; while learning about how the bridge was built, I tried to find the bit that said "lots of rocking and noise is normal".

I mercifully had a break from all the walking yesterday, while Lis took her mum and dad out for another trip to Kyoto to finish off the bits we missed. They must have done just as much walking then, because they seemed very happy to not have to go too far for dinner. They had an early night to prepare for today's Hiroshima trip and I decided to unearth our bike to meet Lis at the station. This was probably not a good idea; about halfway down the mountain there was a distressingly loud snap (which you don't want to hear while travelling at that speed) and the pedals started turning independently of me. Then there was another snap and the pedals didn't turn at all. I freewheeled down to the station and saw that a big piece of rope had wound itself into the gears, dislodging the chain and making me push the bloody thing up the hill to get home. It could have been worse though. Better a bike service than a spine service.