Mum and Kel in Kyoto

On Friday, I taught my class, which went OK, although I had very limited success trying to teach them how to turn their grotesque attempts at thesis statements into good thesis statements. I figure though, that if they learn just a little bit, or just get the idea that the point of writing an essay is to communicate an interesting idea to someone, I’ll have helped them out.

After my class and a very short appearance at the basketball practice, I trained back to meet my mum and brother and Sawa for a dinner celebrating my birthday and mum’s (at Bimota, of course).

My brother Kelly came up to Kyoto for the whole weekend for the first time since the wedding, so we all spent the whole weekend hanging out, hence my lack of updates. We mostly just hung out, ate, and talked a lot, which was a lot of fun. It’s been so long since I’ve just been able to just hang out with my family, without organizing weddings or anything like that. It makes me excited for when we’ll be back in Wellington and near enough to do it with my whole family and Sawa pretty much any time we want to.

On Saturday we spent the day in Uji checking out my mum’s new apartment and office, seeing the famous Byodoin temple that appears on the 10 yen coin

and eating some delicious ice cream and shaved ice stuff, made with the maccha that is Uji’s specialty.

We took an extremely scenic train ride back (in the sense that we got on the Keihan line in the wrong direction and only noticed after going 45 minutes and reaching the end of the line off in Osaka, then rode all the way back. However, we got to sit all together in a four-seater facing each other and talked a lot). Back in Kyoto, we had some delicious takoyaki and then Mum headed back to Uji.

It was just the right balance of sleeping late, hanging out, sightseeing and eating and talking. Oh, and it was blazingly hot out, so it was wonderful to have nice cold icey sweet food. I guess I haven’t mentioned much about the weather lately, but it seems that the rainy season that we’ve been in for the last month has officially ended and now we’re just at the beginning of the two or three months of incredibly humid, hot, sticky weather where you really don’t feel like going outside. Fortunately, just as the all-you-can-heat heater came in handy during the winter, now the all-you-can-cool air conditioner looks like it’s about to be my saviour.

That night, Kel and I hung out with some people from Full House at the Kamo River, then went down to a club together.

Unfortunately, Sawa’s cough still hasn’t let up so she didn’t feel up to hanging out. After getting back around 3:30am or so, we had a nice leisurely sleep in before getting up, meeting up with mum for some lunch, cheescake and drinks at Papa Jon’s, and hanging out in my room talking together and with dad on Skype. Then Kel and I headed off to my basketball practice and said goodbye to Mum. After an hour or so there I took Kel to the train station, where I think we just barely got him on the right path to get the last train to his place, although it’s certainly possible he could get lost on the way back and end up sleeping in a train station over night…