Dad and Roda arrive :-)

Parents! Yay!

I told Roda in advance that she should try to sit on the left side of the plane on the flight from Paris to get a great view of Kobe and Osaka as you land, which she managed to get. I woke up that morning to find it was so foggy I couldn't see the apartment block 200m in front of my window... cest la vie...

So, another trip down the Osaka bypass at silly AM to pick up Roda from Kansai Airport. Guess who I bumped into there... Hiro. As in, "Off to Birmingham for a year, see you in September" Hiro (Incidentally, Thank's to family for kindly adopting him!). Turns out he had a research conference here and so came back FOR A WEEK... that's dedication...

Incidentally, Hiro's last words before heading back to the UK (more or less): "Enjoy the summer hahaha"

Speaking of the Summer, it seems to have arrived... apparently we're in the rainy season, but it hasn't dropped below the high 20s for about 3 weeks now (I'm tanning! In a kind of... Scottish way...).

Except of course for about 4 of the 8 days Dad and Roda were here, where it chucked it down...

Dad arrived the next day from Shanghai (where the food was terrible, so he said), so that was another trip to Kansai airport (this time we took the boat! Novelty!)...

Sadly we didn't really have time to do any traveling outside of Kansai, but I took them round Kyoto, Osaka and Nara etc. The torrential rain actually kept the hordes of Kyoto tourists at bay for once :-)

The (for once not-raining) day we went to Deer-town (Nara), where randomly 5 million billion middle school kids from Gifu (AKA Kaori-town. That's like, just north of Nagoya, half-way to Tokyo) were on a school trip. I don't know exactly what their teachers had told them, but it seemed to have been something along the lines of "If you see a foreigner, run up to them and ask them this questionnaire about their home country.". Actually, knowing Japan it probably was exactly that... This got a little irritating after like, the 100 time...

Oh, and Dad did a presentation at Osaka University, which went really well, and one of the Professors and his wife took us out for lunch in Umeda (central Osaka). It was Kaiseki (very elaborately presented set menu dishes. I think it cost something like ￥10,000 per-person...), and was so delicately made it was really a shame to eat it...

Oh, and some of the tempura was Ayu (a fish), so I made a joke about Ayumi Hamasaki (Who's also called Ayu) in Japanese, to which the old lady explaining the meal replied with "This fish was raised very well and has a most delicate flavour and is generally excellent. Ayu eats junk-food all day. Please do not compare the two!" hehe.

Oh, and the professors wife very kindly explained "子" to me (It means child and is probably about the 3rd Kanji I learned...)...