Today’s kanji lesson: the character shi, meaning “teacher”. It has two parts: the radical in red means “butt”—it even has two boxes to represent, well, you get the idea. The radical in blue is “cloth”. So a teacher is one who wears cloth over butt? Darned if I know, but I at least remembered that kanji on my last test.

By that point my travel group was breaking up faster than a CD in a microwave (two ,explore Kurashiki). So I abandoned ship and joined up with an ubergroup of now nine people in Takamatsu. By the time I got there it was 11 PM. The directions I’d gotten to the hostel were to look for a Daimaru department store, but I didn’t see any, and the guy working at the station had no idea where it was. (How could you work at a train station every day and not know there was a big department store right down the street?) So I called the hostel, and just barely managed to talk to the owner before my phone battery died. Another nice guy, he biked out to the station to meet me. So I spent the night there, and in the morning we headed off for Tokushima in the east.