Be careful which driver you designate.

It turns out that playing board games can be more exciting than you expect. Peaches, Dan and I went over to Lewis' pad to get our Catan on. Japan has a legal blood alcohol limit of 0 so even if you want a few beers you need a DD. Who would be the DD? We decided this in the same way all Japanese school children decided everything, janken! Dan ended up on the loosing side of the janken. I wasn't worried in the slightest because Dan has managed to move his Largo around Japan with only one traffic accident. At about 2 AM we figured it was about time to head back home. Lewis lives up on a hill with narrow streets.

Let me take this time to tell you gaijin traps. For whatever reason, Japan has chosen to have their gutters semi-covered. The usual variety is about 6 inches wide but some are a few feet wide. Then, in a random irregular pattern there is this mixture of stone and metal covers. Here is a pic of the rice field outside of our house.



Don't let the rice field fool you, these are every where. I remember seeing them in Kyoto.

Dan was driving away from Lewis' house when he dropped both of the passenger side tires into a gaijin trap. If our car was a tiny yellow plate car it would have taken us 5 minutes to pick up and push on to the road. Luckily, everyone was leaving about the same time, so there was plenty of people on hand to help out. 10 of us couldn't pick up the front of the car. We took a jack and put it under the tow point, in the front. This got the passenger side up out of the gutter so we could move a metal grate under an actual jack point. Then, we used a second jack to push up the car high enough to put a grate under front wheel. Then we could pick up the rear end to push a grate under the rear wheels. Success!

Just for the record, it takes 10 Jets about an hour to get a car out of a ditch.

Seriously though, for people to give up an hour of sleep at 2 am and not argue while trying to figure out haul our big ol' white plate out of a ditch, speaks volumes about how great the Jets are here.

I didn't get any pics of the car in the ditch, because my camera was in the car. I remebered this when the car was balanacing on a jack and I didn't want to test my luck.

Nothing happening tonight.

Nothing is going on tonight. We went to this Indian place with some friends and got some curry and nan. Piping fresh nan, so that's always delicious. Other than that we didn't do much. Tomorrow we are headed to Fukui-shi and we are going to take a walking tour provided by UNESCO. I don't know why UNESCO is providing the tour, but it should be interesting. Tomorrow night, we are going to a friends house to play some board games. Luckily Peaches parents just sent Settlers of Catan. Sunday we are going to an enkai with our friends. I think Sunday we are thinking about buying a second bike and a new fridge.

Our fridge has some problems. The worst problem it has is it runs all the time, which gave us a $100 dollar electric bill. The thing about buying a fridge here is that it is expensive to get rid of a fridge. I drive past the city dump on the way to one of my schools, and there are usually abandoned refrigerators on the side of the road, which is horrible because there is hardly enough room for the cars on this road. I can only assume that these people left the houst intending to drop of their fridge at the dump, but when they found out how much it cost they dumped it on the side of the road. I guess it will proably be $50 to $100 bucks to get rid of the thing, from what I hear. The refrigerators here are small, or really big with 10 drawers and super expensive. I think we will get a small one which is just fine, because we don't buy that much food a time.

Well I think its time for me to go to sleep now. I'll try to post some more pictures of us in Kyoto, later.

Monkey Mountain

So Monkey Mountain. So you know how zoos use cages. That's tired and played out. At Monkey Mountain, you pay 500 yen or about 5 bucks to climb this Mountain. At the base there are all these signs that warn you about what not to do to the monkeys. I have come to realize that if in Japan, someone has taken the time to write a sign in English, you had better pay attention. One of the warnings is against staring at the monkeys which seems pretty impossible to me, plus I had heard stories about how moneys in Japan are aggressive dirty thieves. I must admit I was pretty nervous about monkey attacks.

You can't see anything but trees on the way up. Then all of the sudden the trees clear and you can see all of Kyoto. It's really nice. There was a cool breeze, which was nice since I spent 20 minutes climbing up a Mountain.

Then monkeys start showing up. They are hanging out, eyeballing us as we climb up. For the most part they are cool. I made a serious effort to watch them with out staring at them. Once I got to the plateau of the Mountain it occurred to me that there are probably two hundred monkeys running around. They were really cute. We took a ton of pictures. I'll post some here, but we almost took 100 pics there. There is this building where you can buy some fruit chunks for a buck. There is a large portion of the building that has chicken wire where you feed the monkeys. There was this tiny old Japanese woman there who was saying, "Hai dozo" to each monkey as she fed them. Hai dozo, is something you usually say to some one when you give them something. I think the monkeys are pretty well fed, because there was this tiny monkey that was taking apple slices and discarding the peels.



Here I am feeding a monkey. I don't trust him.

Here Peaches is feeding a monkey.

This monkey is waiting for food.

Here we are with monkeys and Kyoto in the background.

Lots of grooming going on here.

Cute!

Its true. We had a three day weekend a while back, so we took advantage of it. We stayed in a hotel a stone's throw away from the old Imperial Palace. On the first day we were there we went to a place called Eiga Mura or movie village. It's where they film samurai shows for TV. There are actors walking around the place, who are more than happy to oblige you in the occasional photograph. Then Saruyama or monkey mountain, which will totally get its own post.




This was great. There was this rope that spanned two buildings and this robotic ninja inched from one building to the next. Then he inched backwards in to his ninja hole.

This is Dokuni-sensei. She is Peaches' supervisor. I believe that this is her first time on a horse. Notice that there are no pictures of me on a horse. Horses freak me out.

Here is an adorable little kid feeding carrots to a pony. Japan is crawling with Japanese kids -all of them adorable.

Here we are posing with some actors.

Yep 17th century Japan was plagued by dinosaurs. I'll bet you didn't know that.