Friday I cancelled a date with Antoine to stay home and rest up my body – I’m sure that with rest I’ll shake this cough and get completely better. I barely got through my workday even though I had only two classes. Some other teachers noticed that my morning was pretty open, so they had me interviewing students to practice for their high school entrance interviews.
Friday night Kuniko and I took it easy and just had some delivery pizza for dinner. Then we were off to bed early. Saturday Kuniko had to work, so I stayed home and did my usual laundry/cleaning routine. Then we met up on the train to Himeji so that we could have dinner at the Okamotos’ house.
The former Tsuji-san, now Okamoto-san, lives in Himeji in a new house that they had built on some property that her husband’s family had. The property used to be a rice field, but the whole area is being converted into housing. It is quite a ways from Himeji, though, and they met us at the station in their car, and we drove to their house from there.
The drive was about 20 minutes, and the area where they live is really out in the middle of nowhere. There were a lot of new houses in the area. The nearest convenience store was a good ten minute walk from their place.
The house itself was great – really nice and full of cool amenities. The toilet alone was worth the visit. When you walk into the bathroom the light comes on automatically, the toilet seat opens automatically, and it has all the water squirting fuctions including a butt dryer to ventilate the area afterwards.
We had takoyaki for dinner, homemade right in front of us. Their recipe was just a little different from the Kageyama recipe, but it was good, too. They added dried shrimp to theirs which is something I’ve never tried before.
After dinner we played Japanese Monopoly, which is pretty much the same as the American version except for the names of the properties are Japanese cities, and the money is all in yen. It was pretty clear after we started playing that they hadn’t quite nailed down the strategy of it, and I bought up properties like mad and then started building houses as fast as I could. We wrapped up the game around 9 o’clock, as the handwriting was on the wall and everyone knew it was just a matter of time before everything they owned would be mine. Bwah-ha-ha….
During the evening we looked at the pictures from their honeymoon in Spain. Some of them were pretty dramatic – it looked beautiful. Spain is somewhere I’d like to go someday, so I watched with a lot of interest. Another thing that was interesting was that during the whole night Okamoto-san (Ikuko) didn’t speak any English. She said it was because she had forgotten it all, but I think it might really be because she wanted to keep her husband from feeling like an outsider.
We had lots of dessert, and then hit the road back towards the station. Kuniko and I took the train from there home, and then hit sack pretty early so that we could get up early and head to Kyoto on Sunday.
