Back when Josh was here, we went for a visit in Kamakura and were randomly stopped on the street by an older Japanese man. He asked if we spoke English and then proceeded to give us each a memo he had written basically stating that he was learning English and it was his dream to have an English speaking friend with whom he could correspond. He was really excited and really happy when we took the memos and went on our way.

Last week I decided to write him a note. So I pulled out a stationary card, wrote some basics about myself and Kevin, included some pictures and on Thursday, mailed it off. Today, Sunday, we checked the mail as we were heading out to dinner and low and behold there was a packet from Kakiyama-san! He just doesn't write letters - he collages them!


This is the outside of the packet he sent me in the mail. It was a little difficult to pull out of the mail slot and we were puzzled at what it was at first. Once we realized, I let out a 'squee' of joy and couldn't wait to open it. Inside, he wrote about how happy he was to receive a letter and how Kevin and I looked like Hollywood - cool and beautiful. He also talked about bean paste buns, the tradition of throwing beans to let the good spirits in and bad spirits out, plants (he and his wife like to garden) and included lots of snip-its from flyers and newspapers. He even included a photo of him as a volunteer firefighter at 67 years old! Wow!

Receiving this letter made me smile so much as I'm sure it made him do the same. I guess I'm going to have to get more creative with my next letter because he is definitely showing me up!

Here's a little pop culture Japanese lesson for those of you unfamiliar with the second word in my subject line. "Otaku" is a Japanese term brought over to English that is used to describe someone with obsessive interests, particularly anime, manga, and video games. Hearing someone referred to as an otaku generally has a negative connotation attached as some self-proclaimed otaku have unhealthy obsessions with all things anime (including such things as pillowcases with anime girls in questionable positions printed on them as well as erotic video games) and are, well, socially awkward. However, some people take it in stride and prefer their own definition of "otaku" as someone who is a geek or fan on the side and are a generally normal, everyday kind of person.

I'll admit that I do have my tendencies although it's not an obsession I couldn't live without. Since I'm in Japan, I might as well indulge while I can and with a recent trip to Akihabara with Josh, I picked up a few anime figurines to add to my little collection.

The first two are characters from a series called "Mai-Otome". Nanotechnology, maids, masters, lots of flying, awesome fighting, blah blah blah ILOVEIT! Don't judge!


The next is from a Disney anime (yep) called "Fireball". The episodes are maybe 3 minutes long each and they star this snotty little robot, Drossel. I thought she was just plain adorable and to have this little thing pop out of a coin machine with all its joints working, I was very impressed.


Chibi Usagi also got herself a little doll from the airport. I suppose we should call it Chibi CHIBI Usagi now.


Last but not least, Josh bought me a hand painted figurine of Starbuck from the non-anime series "Battlestar Galactica". It depicts Starbuck in all her butt kicking glory, complete with a signature cigar and her wedding tattoo. It. Is. Amazing.

Last week, we had the pleasure of housing our good friend Josh for a week while he took a vacation to Japan. This was his first "adult" vacation since graduating from college and getting a job so he was very excited about it. And why wouldn't he be?! He got to stay for FREE in Japan with two awesome people! While it was a lot of fun to have him here, he certainly tired us out towards the end. We've pretty much seen everything that he wanted to see and so we were a little disenchanted. Josh, however, was like an ADHD child who was given too much sugar and let loose upon a shiny new world.

The first day he was here, we took him to Kamakura. What better place to dive into culture? Our first stop was Kita Kamakura and the Engakuji Temple complex. Since we'd already been there, it was fun to just go off to the side and try to capture things that I might have missed earlier.


Next up was the Kamakura Daibatsu or Big Buddha as it's affectionately known as.

After feeling sufficiently small, we took a taxi to one of my favorite temples: Hokokuji Temple. This was a good place for him to see bamboo and to have some really great green tea. I'm not one for tea but this stuff was frothy and yummy IF you drank it with one of the provided sweets in your mouth.



The next day we woke up EARLY to visit Tokyo Tower while it was still relatively clear out and the crowds were nonexistent. While Mt. Fuji was difficult to see through the smog that was already forming, we got some good views of just about everything.


From there, we hopped a cab to Akihabara to hopefully get our hands on some anime goods, play arcade games, and to see what a maid cafe was like. Well, we didn't end up staying in the maid cafe too long as it felt like we were taking advantage of the maids as you had to pay a fee per table and then a fee for every 30 minutes the maid serves you. Thanks but no thanks. Towards the end of the day, we were getting tired and wandering around empty handed when we decided to look in one last shop. Jackpot! Josh and I both got action figures, he got original Bleach sketches, and I got some copied sketches from Sailor Moon! We returned home exhausted but victorious.

After kicking it around Tokyo for a few days, Josh went off on his own to Kyoto for an entire day and ended up exploring the entire day. Once he got home, his feet were beat and so the rest of his vacation here, he took it relatively easy. One day in particular, all three of us went to visit Taya Caves and afterwards, Josh wanted to have a little photo shoot in one of the rice fields nearby. The following pictures are for their fake band name, "Good Touch, Bad Touch".


There was also another trip to Yokohama's Cosmo Land with the giant ferris wheel. Before seeing the giant wheel in person, Josh thought he could ride it. Once standing directly below it, he changed his mind and we played arcade games the rest of the afternoon. He had been trying to get a Dragon Ball Z action figure the entire time we were in Japan to no avail. I had loaned him some 100yen coins and when he gave them back, I decided to try my hand at a UFO catcher game(aka Crane Game) just to kill time before leaving. So I went to the machine that had the largest, most random things in it and decided why not.


I ended up going home with a large stuffed alpaca, erm, "Arpakasso". Carrying that home on the trains was quite amusing.

As the week winded down, so did all three of us. We made one last pilgrimage to Harajuku Sunday morning because we heard that people cosplay on this one particular bridge every Sunday morning. Well, we got up super early again and arrived at about 9am to...and empty bridge. Everything was empty and closed and there were no cosplayers in sight. To kill time we all had some waffles and then decided to take some photos in a purikura photo booth. Photo booths in Japan are INTENSE! Not only do you get to choose our photo style, but once they've been taken, you can edit them (sparkles, stickers, colors, you name it) and then send them to your phone.



Pretty awesome way to end an amazing week with an amazing friend if I do say so myself!

First off, I apologize profusely as this second part has been a long...long...LONG time coming. The week after I last posted, I started getting rather busy, preparing for my friend Josh to come visit us here in Japan. Then his plane landed and so I've been out of commission for this entire week as well.

Secondly, here's the summary of our holiday home when we visited Kevin's family in Florida. When we landed, his grandmother greeted us with as much enthusiasm as my mother with hugs all around. An hour or so later, we arrived at his grandparent's house in Inglis, Florida. For this part of our vacation, we'd be sharing a house with his grandparents, parents, aunt, uncle, and two cousins. This wasn't a normal house - this house was built to accommodate influxes of family members comfortably. Heck, I think I ended up asking where Kevin was on more than one occasion and was afraid I'd lost him in some room somewhere.


After getting settled in, I was whisked away to the mall with "the girls" (his mom and grandmother). If I remember correctly, I think I visited that mall every day we were there except for the second day when we took a trip up the coast to visit his mother's mother and to see his grandfather's grave.

The drive was long and on the way there, Kevin and his mother switched off driving as it was a drive of over six hours. I really wanted to drive but was never given the chance and held that over Kevin for as long as it would take me. Before we saw his grandmother, we stopped at his grandfather's grave site which wasn't really a site at all. After his grandfather's death, Kevin's had a hard time dealing with his grief and wanted to see if visiting would help ease the pain. Unfortunately, there was no place marker on the ground for him to see and associate with. Instead, it was an area of grass that was approximated by his mother because a plaque had yet to be ordered and placed. I think it really hit him hard and if he had more time alone to take it in, it might have been a good release for him. However, we had to check into our room at the Navy lodge and so his grieving and coping was cut short. The next morning, we headed back to Inglis but this time took a "scenic" route along the ocean. Little did I know the scenic route pushed our travel time to seven plus hours to get home and STILL I was denied the wheel. So for that seven-something hour drive, I slept and looked out the window. The views of the ocean were wonderful. However, the rest of the views were not. It definitely solidified my resolve to not move to Florida ever. While the area his grandparents live in is nice, the portion of the state that we drove through was not. I'm not sure if it was because of the amount of hurricanes that have hit the state or many other reasons, it just looked like people stopped trying. Houses were not well taken care of, there were very few businesses to speak of, and it all just seemed so tired. I could go into it more, but I think I would get depressed and this post is about how we spent our Christmas vacation.

Once we arrived back in Inglis, we were informed that there was an escaped convict roaming the area last night. They had helicopters, dogs, and search teams scouring the area and even walked through the house. Apparently the convict was escorted out of prison an officer to a crime scene, broke free, ran down a dock (with stitches and a cast), jumped into the river, swam across and ran. Later they found his orange jumpsuit near the river and then clothes were reported missing off of a clothesline in the area. By the time we left, he was still at large. Welcome to Florida.


During our stay, we also went to see Avatar and Sherlock Holmes. I loved Avatar but really didn't care for Sherlock Holmes. Christmas was pretty fun as well. It was odd not seeing snow or having the temperature be below 40 degrees but it was celebrated nonetheless. The big highlight of Christmas morning was when Kevin's grandmother received a bucket list present from his grandfather. He got her a Canon DSLR camera AND a European cruise that visits Denmark and Russia of all places. How amazing is that?! Not going to lie, I shed a few tears just watching her react with such genuine joy and seeing just how much in love his grandparents are. I hope that when we're their ages, we're still as much in love with one another.

The next day was our big day out as I introduced his family to geocaching. I'd like to say I'm the geocaching messiah as I've converted quite a few people since I've been introduced myself. Well, maybe it's like Avon where I throw house parties and get people to buy things and they, in turn, throw parties of their own and it just spreads like a plague. Either way, Kevin, his grandmother, his two cousins, and I went out into Inglis looking for these geocaches. The first was a bust and so I was afraid they would get frustrated but they were game to keep looking. The next three were in a little park area near a canal that none of them had been to so we were all unfamiliar but ready to go.


His cousin Michelle actually found the first cache which was very exciting. After she found it, we gave her the GPS so she could get a feel for it. The second one was a bit more difficult to find but Michelle found it again! We had to pick one of a few pathways, hop over some water, dodge a coral snake, and then found it.

Coral snake? Yep. Red touches yellow, you're a dead fellow. Red touches black, you're OK, Jack.

This guy slithered out in front of us and his grandmother and I just jumped back into one another. I've only ever seen harmless garter snakes out in the wild and so running into a poisonous snake in the wild was a little jarring for me.


The final cache Kevin ended up finding. I wasn't very into looking anymore because I just kept expecting a snake to pop out at my feet. All in all, they were really excited about geocaching and sounded like they would be interested in taking it up on their own. It turns out that Kevin's cousin, Charlie, got hooked and right after he left his grandparents started his own account and found some of his own geocaches.

Geocaching was a pretty great end to a fast and full vacation back home, discounting the fact that our flight home was delayed until the next day. The whole trip really made me both miss Japan and miss the US and while there are some things that I might not like about the US, I really can't wait to come back.

When we arrived at my dad's house, we instantly hooked into the internet. My mom's house has been internet challenged for my entire life as no one wants to pay for an expensive cable line to run down our street. Because of this, we'd had dial-up until I went to college which is when my mother got a wireless card that picks up some internet off of cell towers around the area. Major improvement but the downside is that you can only use so much bandwidth/downloading per month and it's only limited to my mother's computer. Great for her but not so great when there's 3 people wanting to do different things at the same time.

Anyway, my dad was at home that day (on a Thursday?!) and so we all lounged about and worked on word association games. There's an application for the iTouch called "iAssociate" and it's oh so addicting. You start with a central word like "blue" and there are empty slots for words stemming off of it all around. Your job is to think of what words would be associated with blue. So, "sky" would go to one and then sky would branch off into 5 bubbles of its own. Then they all start connecting with two or more things which is where it gets fun.


There was one game that started with "Poker Stars" and since none of us knew anything about poker stars, we had to do a little cheating via the accessible internet. After a few hours, we managed to finish the entire application including bonuses. Woo! Now I'm itching for an iAssociate 2 or something because now we use my iTouch for a level instead. Oh the possibilities. That night we all went out to the Clam Bar in North Syracuse for some yummy seafood. I had crab legs (hot ones!) and Kevin tried to have a fish fillet. Unfortunately, he'd recently started developing a cold and was feeling sick to his stomach and so the fillet remained mostly untouched and was boxed for later.

Starting now, my memory starts to blur and days are starting to run into one another. If something's different or happened on a different day, I apologize. Ben got here late-ish Saturday afternoon and then we all went out for some good ol' Dinosaur BBQ. I missed this place SO MUCH! I got some pulled pork (but couldn't find the sandwich version I usually get) and requested pickles on the side. Upon testing, I realized these pickles hadn't had enough time to properly pickle and so my home made ones tasted MUCH better. Score one for me! After Dinosaur, Ben, Kevin, and I went to Carousel because Ben needed to do some more Christmas shopping for his friends and family. One of the things he bought for someone was a remote controlled, dual blade helicopter and he started flying it around the house. My dad's house has a great room which is open to 2 stories and so Ben had quite the time flying it up there as well as landing it in my hair which resulted in a panicked/giggly Sue whose first thought was to get a camera to take a picture.


It came out relatively easy. No Katie was harmed in the making of this picture. That night we all got together and played some Apples to Apples that Sue had acquired and never played. We successfully introduced them to the hilarity and awesomeness that is Apples to Apples.

The next day we were set to get together for brunch with my aunt, uncle, cousin, and grandparents on my father's side. We all woke up early and were anxious to go do something before brunch and so I suggested that we go geocaching. Ben wasn't quite sure of what it was and Kevin and I were both positive he'd have a lot of fun with it. We went out and found one that was on the side of a hill (read: cliff) and was relatively simple to find. Now that we'd piqued his interest, Ben wanted to do more so we went back to the house, downloaded 3 more that were in a state park down the road and went off to find those.


The first one we found took some looking. A lot of Clark Reservation is made up of rocks that have deep deep cracks between one another that can cause you to break or do a number on your ankle if you misstep. Add snow to this and it makes for one interesting and sometimes dangerous environment to geocache in. We eventually found the cache in one of these cracks, covered in snow. Ben was totally hooked now.


The next one involved some bushwhacking, or so we thought since the trails were difficult to make out in the snow. We found it pretty easily and then found the third in a similar fashion. Ben now really wants to find one (or make one) that involves abseiling down a rock face to get to. He likes the ones that involve a hike (go figure) more than the ones that are just off the street. I think in the US you have more options to choose from since not all of it is urban.


After the third find, we ran back to the car and made it to brunch JUST in time (maybe a minute or two late). After a very filling brunch, we all went back to my dad's house to play Apples to Apples with the entire family. Everyone eventually got the hang of it and in the end we were roaring with laughter. Time passed very fast and before we knew it, the sun was gone and Ben was hours late to a dinner with his family. So he said goodbye to everyone and a little later, Kevin and I did as well since we had to wake up at 2am to start our journey to Tampa, Florida.

Kevin woke up at 1am to pack his remaining things. By 3am we were on the road to Rochester's airport. It was EARLY and normally I'm the one who feels sick to her stomach at that hour but today the roles were reversed and it was Kevin's turn. We stopped for a break and I got him some stomach meds from my luggage and we continued our journey. When we got to the airport and checked through security, we realized that our plane was delayed into Philly. Oh, I suppose I should mention that a huge storm dumped a foot or more of snow all along the east coast that weekend, JUST missing Syracuse. When we finally got to Philly, we only had 10 minutes to switch terminals by tram in order to make our connecting flight into Tampa. Our initial arrival time in Tampa was around 10:30am, but we finally touched down around 12:30pm. We got out of there just in time too, as Kevin's brother was stuck there for 6 hours waiting on his flight.

Next installment starts the Florida part of our holiday vacation!