Well, despite what I said the other day about there being not much to write about… in fact, there is.
Sunday Kuniko went off to work early in the morning for her tea ceremony session with her students, and so I had all day to kill by myself. The weather was brilliant – sunny and clear. It was hot, too, so that factored into my plans a little and I decided to skip a hiking trip that I had considered for fear of heatstroke.
I hit the road to Akashi in the late morning on a quest to do something I hadn’t done in a long time – get a library card.
The Akashi city library is located right in the middle of the city park, built on top of and around the ruins of the Akashi castle. The park is beautiful, and I’m very happy to be living a little closer to it now. I walked through the park after leaving the station, and there were all kinds of activities going on. There was a traditional dance competition that was quite large – teams of people in costumes practiced together all over the place, and then there was a big stage in the middle of the big grassy area in the front of the park for them to perform on. There was TV coverage as well, so it was pretty involved.
In the park’s baseball stadium high school teams were playing each other to represent the area in the all-Japan high school championship held every year over at the Hanshin Tigers’ stadium – Koshien park.
I walked through all the commotion and climbed the hill that used to make up the backside of the castle foundation, heading towards the library. The walk was nice, and as always I felt that tinge of “Wow, I’m in Japan!” as I walked through the forest being buzzed by dragonflies and butterflies, crossing Japanese-style bridges along the way.
Finally I reached the library – about a 10 minute walk from the station, but it felt like it was in the middle of nowhere. I’ve only explored a small portion of the library – there is an academic section that I haven’t really looked at as well as some special rooms and even a restaurant.
I worked with a nice lady who helped me get up with a library card, checked out my first book (Dick Francis’ 10 lb. Penalty in Japanese) and even helped me reserve another book that I want to read. The only downside to all this is that the check-out time is around three weeks, which is no problem for English books but a little tough for Japanese. It beats buying books at the store all the time, though.
After the library I walked back to town, did a quick search for shoes (my size not available) and finally grabbed a quick bite to eat and headed home.
In a very pleasant surprise Kuniko got home around 4:30 in the afternoon – which is pretty early for her, even on a Sunday. We relaxed around the house and then decided to go out to dinner to celebrate – she hasn’t had much time off at all lately. She’ll be working right up until the day we leave for Europe – it’s a tight schedule. She’s only had a few days off last month, and those days we were moving. In an effort to relieve the stress we went to an Italian restaurant across the street from our place for dinner.
The place had a good atmosphere, and wasn’t so busy. Even though it wasn’t packed, food came at a very leisurely pace, and it was a good thing we weren’t starving. We had a octopus and vegetable salad that was really good, a pasta with gorgonzola cream sauce, and a cheese pizza with various cheeses on it – really tasty.
We walked off the dinner by patrolling Saty and Vivre, and finally came home and hit the sack. Tomorrow is Monday, and Kuniko will be leaving early to fight in the trenches again.
