Kuniko and I are both in hangover recovery mode after a heavy night of drinking. I was hanging out with Antoine, and Kuniko was attending a farewell party for the tennis club in Kobe. <\/p>\n
Antoine and I met in Suma, and did a loop hike up the hill and through the forest. At the top I produced a couple of cold beers from my backpack, and we walked the hour long trail through the forest with beers in hand. It was a nice moment – it would have been fun without the beers, but it made it even better with a cold one at the top. After the hike we had dinner at an izakaya in Suma that we had been to before with Nel when he was living nearby.<\/p>\n
Antoine told me about his wedding plans – they are looking at getting married the last week in December here in Japan, to make it easy for his family to travel here. It sounds like they are aiming for a much simpler wedding than what they had considered before. Miwako’s sister works for a restaurant in Kitano, and she was going to help set up the after-party. I was surprised to hear the name of the restaurant: Graciani. That’s one<\/a> of<\/a> our<\/a> favorite<\/a> restaurants.<\/p>\n From there Antoine wanted to go back to Donkey and maybe play some darts. I hadn’t been back to Donkey in a long time, so we decided to hit Akashi. We found the place looking completely different. They had remodeled to get rid of the retail liquor shop that was part of the layout, and instead made another bar and added two more dart boards. They also were having a dart league night, so weren’t able to get any darts time. The Guinness was good, though, and we were served by the master’s daughter who was there to help out while the master and his wife participated in the tournament. <\/p>\n Since we weren’t able to throw darts we decided to have a “sports” competition over at the bowling alley. We played drunken ping pong, and I trounced Antoine – so we moved to billiards and I beat him three games to zip. Afterwards we walked over to where the old spooky Indian restaurant had burned down to see if there was anything new being built, but there was just an empty lot. <\/p>\n We wanted “just one more drink” but by then everything was closing up, so I bought Antoine a bottle of chu-hi for the road, and sent him off in the right direction. I caught a train towards Okubo, and sent a message to Kuniko to see where she was. To make a long story short she had been drinking too much, and had to make a pit stop in Tarumi on the way home. Luckily one of her co-workers helped her get home safely, and we took our hangover precautions and went to bed. <\/p>\n Next week I start a two week stint at a large company called Daikin, in southern Osaka. It will be a lot of commuting time, but hopefully the classes will be fun. Today we’ll take it easy, and then tomorrow I’ll make a temporary re-entry into the working world.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Kuniko and I are both in hangover recovery mode after a heavy night of drinking. I was hanging out with Antoine, and Kuniko was attending a farewell party for the tennis club in Kobe. Antoine and I met in Suma, and did a loop hike up the hill and through the forest. At the top […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1471","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pOpl7-nJ","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1471","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1471"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1471\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1471"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1471"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1471"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}