Hello! It’s been a little quiet around here, I know, but there hasn’t been much out of the ordinary going on. Well, if any of you were to think this place is ordinary. Mostly I’ve just been stressing about tests and homework and essays, all that boring stuff us college kids have to deal with. My Saturday was interesting though…

I’ve been keeping with the running club, which I hope is at least keeping me from gaining weight for my efforts, but it’s hard to tell. The runs during the week are rather nice, apart from having to wake up at 6:30 every other day, but I don’t know that I’ll be joining the Saturday runs much any more… this week, we had the “Panasonic Run,” so called because some employees from Panasonic joined us to show us around a place called Fushimi-Momoyama (Fushimi is an area around Kyoto; Momoyama means “Peach Mountain”). What I thought was going to be a nice 2-hour social outing ended up being the 8-hour excursion from hell. We started off playing some games (odd stretching and relay races), but even after we had been relay-ing on the gravel paths, which are just as hard to run on as sand, for some time, then the actual ran began. I wish I had remembered to bring my camera along, because I saw a lot of cool places, but maybe it was better that I didn’t have something extra to worry about.

But the actual “run” lasted about 2 hours, as in, 2 hours of jogging for a while, then stopping to take pictures or get a history lesson, then run aimlessly again, on and on and on. The professor who leads our group was not with us because he claimed to still be sick, so we didn’t really know what was going on, or when this was going to end. It got ridiculous real quick. At last we made it back to the train station to get our bags, and we trekked over to a public bath.

Some of you have heard my stories about the hot springs (onsen) before I’m sure… well I really don’t know what the difference is between public baths and hot spring places, because it’s basically the same concept: everybody gets naked and sits in hot tubs. Of course, there are separate sections for men and women, but you go in, make sure to wash off first with soap and shampoo and all that, and then you can go sit in whatever tub you want. But it’s a little disturbing, seeing as everyone is walking around naked like it’s the most normal thing in the world, and in our case we were surrounded by old Japanese women. If the grandmothers of America knew about such a thing… hahaha.

By the time this joyous event was over, I was absolutely starving (stupid me for not eating breakfast), but the place our professor wanted to go was quite a ways away. After getting back on the train, then walking for another 20-30 minutes, we finally found the place, but they told us the wait to sit down was 30 minutes. One girl and I were fed up by that time as well as hungry, so we decided to go off on our own… good thing we did too. We found a great restaurant, which was Germany-themed for some reason, and had wonderful food with two big bottles of beer accompanied by champagne flutes. I think we were mostly happy about the beer. 😉

We got home around 4 (an hour before the rest of the group, I later found out) and I collapsed on my futon. Interesting day, yes, but I thought I would have much more time to get some work done. Let’s just say I might be conducting my own Saturday runs that won’t take nearly so much time from now on…