heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeey...

Gidday folks.
We had Jon and Melody come visit us last week. It was choice. they arrived on the Friday night at 5 and, guided by the Archs directions managed to board the `Hurricane` train and get on in to Kyoto Station where the aforementoned Arch met them and escorted them back to his place while Tom, Kerryn, Nic and I set record time - 2 hours flat - from our neck o` the woods to Archs. We met the weary travellers at Archs nearby Okonomiyake joint (Okonomiyaki is like a cabbage pancake - finely chopped cabbage with egg and a little flour that you pour onto a griddle at your table and cover with meats and veges before flipping it and letting the goodness griddle. `course it`s real hot so you have to drink a lot of beer. Just like if you were an iron worker. Keep reaching for that rainbow.)
So we drank and yarned and it was bloody good to see them. We strolled back to Archs shoebox apartment and nattered and made an awful lot of noise and finally sank into sleep about 2ish. Next morning, at the crack of 9:30 we were out the door and on our way to the Kyoto to have a gander at some of the most "Japanese-y" sights Kyoto had to offer, we hit Fushimi Inari , Sanjusangendo , a little known house just behind that one of which the ceiling was built using the floor upon which 384 people committed ritual suicide a few hundred years ago. You can still see a couple of hand prints and a dudes face print and a body outline from where they fell.....eeeeeeew. Finally we hit Kiyomizudera before dragging our sorry selves home and sitting for a bit. Then we went to Karaoke. For 3 hours. We butchered songs well into the morning time and then all 7 of us plus young Kate Simkiss up from down the line and the lovely Bri-Bri-What-A-Guy hunkered down in the tiny, tiny apartment, with the temperature outside being a balmy 28 or so degrees. And the the air conditioner stopped working. That was bad.
We arose on the Sunday and tooled around acheiving very little before Jon, Melody, Nic and I jumped in the car and headed to Uji (Byodoin). Thats a very nifty place. We then trundled home, went to conveyer-belt-sushi for dinner, drank singularly too much and went to bed.
Monday dawned with Nic and I grinning as we were on holiday and it was off to Nagoya for a temple market....
Till next time...
tata.