Stuffed and burned

So here I am, in my home away from home, my in-laws house. You hear all sorts of guff about people's in-laws and the hell of visiting them but really I couldn't be much happier. Seriously I would happily change my name to include theirs. Of course it helps that they live so close to Kyoto.

We made our way up here slowly using the special offer seishun 18 kippu. Normally we come up by shinkansen, the bullet train and it takes about two hours to get here. We also have to take local trains to get to the shinkansen stops, so the total travel time is longer. The problem with using the shinkansen is the cost. It's about sixty-five quid per person one way.

So we used a different kind of thing this time. Seishun 18 kippu are a special book of five tickets only on sale and usable during university holidays. You pay about 55 quid for the five tickets and can then use one ticket to travel for one calendar day on the trains as much as you like. The tickets don't have to be only used by one person either. The missus and me used two tickets a day on our two day journey up to Kyoto on the local trains - you can't use the bullet train. It was slower, but we could stop on the way at Miyajima, an world heritage site near Hiroshima, and then went on to Kurashiki and spent the night there. Slowly making our way up to Kyoto on the second day.

Now I sitting here replete after feasting on okonomiyaki and gyoza and under the air conditioner. I'm trying not to move my shoulders too much as I got pretty badly sunburned after going to an open air pool the other day with my wee girl, my brother-in-law and his son. I wasn't such a fool as to not use sun block but apparently didn't reapply it enough.

Before heading up here I made an effort to be sociable for the first time perhaps with my fellow JET people. There was a pretty big influx of new recruits this time and is this is likely to be my last year on the programme I thought I should give it a go. I still don't really recall how to be sociable - if I ever knew - but chatting and drinking and eating was something I managed to do. I guess I realised I do need to have to contact with some other native speakers occasionally.