先生の家

Today, I visited one of my teachers from last semester who I've been in somewhat constant contact with. He invited me to lunch a few weeks back, and I kind of invited myself up to his house. He said it was fine, and we decided on a day, which was today.

It takes him (who was sick today, hence the mask) about ten minutes to get to school by scooter; it took me about an hour to get to his house by bike. Needless to say, there're some slopes involved. It was difficult, and I barely managed it, but I was able to bike the entire way up and even farther than I had to go by quite a ways. He lives up in a suburb about eight kilometers (5.7 miles) away from where I live, and while the elevation gain is only about 200m (~650 feet) it feels a lot more significant on a bike.

He met me at a traffic circle - the first I've ever actually seen - which I went to kind of on a hunch, and it ended up being right next to his house. This picture is a 360-degree panorama taken from nearly the middle of the traffic circle. Guess where the sun is.

I met for the first time both his children (two of 'em) and his wife (one of those!) and both seemed very pleasant to say the least. My teacher is well into his fifties, and from the time frames they mentioned while we were talking, his wife (who is Canadian, and appeared to be of Northern European ancestry, maybe so far as Irish, but I didn't ask) must be getting near that mark as well, but she must be benefiting from the Japanese lifestyle or something, because she could very well be in her early thirties judging by her appearance.

Oh, and they had cheese. Real, honest to cheese, cheese. White cheddar, yum, yum. You have no idea how long it's been since I had cheesy cheesy cheese. Cheese. ... Apparently, they had gone to Costco (there's one in Osaka somewhere) the previous day with some friends, and had just gotten back, as they gave me about a half a pound of cheese to me and a further half pound to deliver to some friends. Yum. Cheese.

We went for a walk and ran into some kids who were walking a dog. When they saw me, they started talking about me a little, and eventually, one of them said to another "Hey, say something in English!" I turned around and interjected "Japanese is okay, too." I love getting people with that one. They had a cute little dog, as well. Isn't he (?) cute?

We visited a bird sanctuary near where he lives as well as a couple of parks, then came back to his house for a bit and talked for another hour or so, then I headed home. The ride home didn't take nearly as long, since the whole thing was downhill and I don't need a map to simply go down a hill.

[These random plants are blurry because I have my camera set to use a shutter speed of 1/60 when the flash is on, and I didn't think to compensate for the fact that I had the lens zoomed at 200mm on top of the 1.5x magnification from my APS-C sensor. That gives an effective 300mm of focal length, and while my lens is rated for a nominal three stops (1/60>1/120>1/240>1/480) the flash didn't take in enough light to overpower the ambient, hence the blur.]

With just a few days left in Japan, I'll be selling my bike tomorrow. I've used it pretty hard, so it looks older than it is, but used bikes don't fetch much anyway. I'd be getting a pretty good deal if I got $30 for it. The other one (the first new bike I bought in Japan) is too beat up to fetch me more than $10 if I'm lucky, but one of my friends is going to fix it up and use it, since it has gears and she has a tire patching kit.

[Edit: We also saw this car while we were walking around. You can see on the front it's a GT-R, but we saw a couple of other really nice cars while wandering around.
On the way back, I saw an import car shop and saw for the first time in nearly a year a car with the steering wheel on the right (which is to say, "left") side.]

[Another edit: I asked my teacher later if it was alright for me to put this up later, and I like it, so here it is. My teacher and his wife, at right.]