I got plenty of rest last night, and woke up refreshed and ready to eat in the morning. I made myself a big Denver style omelete, and got ready to head over to visit the old man in Takasago that I had agreed to meet. Before I left I stopped by Jane’s apartment and helped her move some furniture around. We managed to get things the way she wanted, and I made a few phone calls for her in Japanese to arrange her internet connection. Then I had a quick lunch and headed to Takasago.
At the station I met the lady who asked me about this initially. We soon were met by another lady who drove us to pick up yet a third lady. As we were driving around collecting people I started to wonder if I understood correctly about chatting with an old guy. Was that just a ploy to get me in the car? Am I going to be sold into white slavery?
Turns out the next stop was at a private home, and when we went in, I met the old guy in question. He had a stroke about a year ago, so half his body wasn’t working too well, but he spoke a little bit of English and he wanted to try it out on me. We sat down around the table and chatted.
Everyone was very nice, and they kept me eating tea, coffee, fruit, cookies, everything. The wife was bustling around in the kitchen keeping us set up with food and drink while we chatted in the living room. He had lots of questions. We even pulled out the Japanese calligraphy gear to do a little calligraphy. It was fun to try it out – I’ve never really done it before. Everyone said “oooohh” and “aaaaahhh” while I wrote kanji like é«˜ç ‚ and æ•™è·.
We had a great time, but as we continued we started getting into more difficult topics like Japanese whaling and birth control (two separate topics, actually). The more complex stuff meant that they had to resort to Japanese to explain their ideas to me, and that was just too tough to understand. After about three hours, I apologized and said that I had to get going.
They dropped me off at the station, and everyone was really happy with how it went. I thought it was fun, something that made everyone happy.
Kuniko gave me a call after she got home from work, and invited me to come over and hang out at her place for the weekend. I was on a train ten minutes later and pulled into Osaka one hour after that.
She was exhausted from working on Saturday, and so we decided to get a pizza (spicy jalapeno pizza!) and watch a movie that one of her co-workers lent her, The Rock. It’s kind of a body count movie, and watching it again through Kuniko’s eyes was an interesting experience. I would cringe as the bodies would stack up.
We were off to bed after that. I think we were both so tired for different reasons.
