Entries this day: hiking,_fooding

hiking, fooding

10:51pm JST Tuesday 17 November 2009 (day 14482)

I wanted to call this entry ほうとう hike, but I don't know the kanji for the first word, and I can't use those characters in filenames anyway. This is another reason to make my journal DB driven, but there's no clear mapping from ascii filenames to utf8 titles so I guess it wouldn't really matter.

Anyway,

Had a lovely time out southwest of Tokyo, semi near 橋本, which is the other end of the line I rarely use out of Chigasaki, and therefore forgot its name.

Um, anyway,

Got to see YK and Yuan again, and met Travis's girlfriend Yumi for the first time. Met Gernot's wife Kayo for the first time, and several other peeps whose names escape me at the moment (it's been a couple days now). There are two names that have not yet escaped me, but I'll get to those shortly.

When I heard about this event from Travis, I thought it would be in a house of someone he knew, but we were actually sorta out in a wooded park, and the house was a traditional Japanese style house with thatch roof and tatami floors above dirt floor entry. Two cooking areas in the house, both on the dirt, and one in the middle of (a hole in) the tatami floor.

We sat around the tables for introductions and Travis gave us all name tags that he printed on the computer and placed on little wooden plates. He gave someone their nametag, and then gave the next one to Kayo who goes, "やだ、ありがとう！" which I found realllly funny and even posted it on FB as the funniest quote of the day, betting my reputation that there'd be nothing funnier uttered during the day.

I could spend about an hour trying to capture the subtlety of the first word, but basically it means "yuck" or simply "no" in the meaning of "I don't like that" or "I don't want that," And the second word, simply is "thank you."

So she basically reacted with "no! thank you!" but not in the polite decline way of English, just the funny way it sounded in Japanese.

ANYWAY

I sat by Chihiro because she had braces, and was sitting in the sun with some of her peeps. I specified the sun as my primary reason for joining them.

Didn't *really* talk to her all that much; language barrier, age barrier, we were busy preparing food, etc etc kept me out of trouble.

We made noodles by mixing flour and water (and ??) and rolling it into a flat dough and slicing it into centimeter-wide strips. (man I gotta hurry with this; I'm falling asleep quickly)

Food was great; I sat with Travis and YK, basically wanting to pick Travis's brilliant programming brain. When I told him I was considring learning Python, but also interested in Haskell cause he kept mentioning it, he was like, "learn Python if you want to learn something useful, and learn Haskell if you really want to blow your brain!"

After multiple servings of soup, we cleaned up and went on a hike. That's when I started going barefoot (I shoulda left my shoes at the building but I carried them with me). Ended up walking near Setsuko for much of the walk. She seemed quite flirtatious with everyone, and I certainly didn't stop her from chatting and flirting with me.

She carried U-Cow for much of the walk, and held Kayo's hand for even more of the walk. (not that I was keeping careful track)

After the walk, I put socks on my feet to cover them (my feet, not the socks) enough so I could walk inside again. People started to disperse while the rest of us ate desserts and eventually it became time to go.

On the bus going back, I sat in the back of the bus with Setsuka on my right and Jass (Jess?) on my left.

Back at the train station, we said bye to most peeps, but then Travis, Yumi, Setsuko and I went for a gander at the Christmas lights for Hello Kitty and then went to karaoke for some fun singing fun. Travis and I did several hip hop songs, many of which I had never seen, heard, much less performed. Great time for all.

Then to an italian restaurant, where I drew on the back of my placemat and gave it to Setsuko, so she drew on the back of her placemat and gave it to me. Awwwww.

She didn't give me her contact info and she hasn't contacted me, and that's probably for the best.