金の週間： Week of Golden-ness

Incidentally, crazy psycho schoolgirl from Kill Bill pt 1 has a singing career now...

I decided in the end that I will indeed take the JLPT 2 test this August (Potentially at the same time Sophie is here - yay to that one :-). Sophie coming, not the test, but never mind). My life has thus become fantastically study-tastic. I close my eyes at night and all I see are kanji :-(

So yea, the other major thing this time of year is Golden Week, which is a bunch of Japanese public holidays coincidentally in a row. It actually is only 4 days of holiday with a work-day and the weekend in the middle, so not really a week as such, but Japan has it's own "Special" attitude when it comes to time (the TV schedule occasionally has stuff like "2345-2600" on the schedule and opening hours can be stuff like 17:00-28:00).

Oh, and incidentally, in spite of those Kanji at the top, the Japanese just call it "Golden Week" or GW for short...

So, I exiled myself off to Yoo's for a few days in the middle of no-where. Yoo claims to live in Kyoto, but I discovered this time that infact his house is about 1km from the border with Fukui Prefecture ergo, BARELY Kyoto.

Oh, and a bunch of his Dad's German relatives were there as well, so I got to repair my German a little bit :-)

We also went to a town called Obama. Apparently Obama-sama (the real one, not me) wrote them a letter last year...

Oh, and we drove to the top of this mountain overlooking Obama and Wakasa-bay, then spent 2 hours trekking down it to go to this really pretty little cove. Obviously, given Water+Germans, inevitably there was some disturbing nudity involved...

For some reason we ended up climbing about 3 or 4 other mountains as well over those few days...

Yoo also came back to Kobe for a couple of days, and, in a really weird twist, introduced me to his half-Scottish friend (who lives in proper Kyoto) who went to Boroughmuir High school (about 500m from my High-School).

Incidentally, avoid Kyoto like the plague on public holidays...

I find it kinda hard to talk about "nothing" in Japanese to be honest... This probably wasn't helped by the fact that Yoo was being a bit quiet and rather annoyingly not telling me when I wasn't making any sense... grr.