Trip to Wakayama

(Note: written on June 25th)

I just got back from an overnight trip to Wakayama to see my brother and meet his host family, and going from there directly to my Noh lesson at 11am this morning and I’ve started writing this on the bus back.

The last few days have been full of good food, traveling, fun meeting people, and sickness.

Some time last Thursday or so I started getting a cold for the first time in Japan (not including the two times I got food poisoning or something). On the weekend we went to Kyushu and Kobe to see Sawa’s grandma and other relatives, which was great and full of delicious food, including this sweet Kobe beef! Shibe was so happy!

I thought it was getting better, but then on Sunday morning for some reason my right cheek hurt, and rather than getting better it hurt more throughout the day and in the evening I started getting a fever. (The day was great though, we met the last of Sawa’s relative that I hadn’t yet met and had a delicious kaiseki meal).

Unfortunately, although the next day was my birthday, I woke up still feeling horrible. Fortunately, since we knew we’d be busy around my birthday we had planned a quiet relaxing day, which worked well with the sickness. Sawa also started feeling sick, but that didn’t stop her from pampering me and having a nice birthday drinking coffee,

watching the DVD of the spring Zumbyes concert, listening to some new standup comedy, talking to my parents and brother and having a nice bath. It did stop her from making a special birthday dinner like she’d planned, but it worked out well because Ranbo had wanted to make us dinner anyway and made some great Japanese fusion-y pasta.

Also, by the end of the day my fever had come down, although even now my cheek still hurts and I feel a bit sick.

On Tuesday I went to Wakayama to see my brother Kelly. We met up at his host brother’s athletics festival in Osaka, which was interesting to watch. We even got to participate in this one game where we throw little balls in the hoops (like old-school basketball).

His host brother is super-fast, and also, it turns out, super strong. He’s a tiny little 15-year-old Japanese kid, but he destroyed me and Kelly in arm-wrestling. It was so embarrassing.

After the festival, we went to a nice onsen to relax (they didn’t have the kind of iced coffee I wanted to drink afterward!) and then we had an amazing birthday celebration dinner at his host family’s house, complete with some nice presents from Kelly (including his famous chocolate chip cookies). It was all great fun.

(I keep updating these late and then having to catch up the next one too. Unfortunately, now I need to sleep, but hopefully I might be able to catch up tomorrow on the commute to work. Unfortunately, after that I’ll fall behind again for a couple of days because I’m going to basketball camp!)