The Sunday before last was a barbeque with DESSA (the Doshisha [University] English Speaking Student Association) on the banks of Kamo River in Kyoto. Never have I seen anyone get that drunk at 2:30 in the afternoon. We still made a ton of traditional Japanese outdoor hibachi. Lesson learned: Wooden chopsticks are great for eating but not so good for putting stuff on a flaming grill.

We followed that up with a trip to Club JJ, a new sensation sweeping Kyoto. It’s a nine-story building downtown with unlimited video games, pool tables, karaoke, bowling, even some sort of BB gun firing range and a rumored pool. And it’s all only 300 yen per hour. In exchange you have to register, a process that involves supplying your cell phone number and address and answering a few survey questions. (I didn’t want to take the time to decipher the questions, so I might have told them I wear pantyhose and speak Chinese for all I know.) They e-mail a sort of bar code pattern to your phone, which you then use to scan yourself in on future visits. After you’re done (and this is key because you lose track of time inside) you scan out and pay for the time you spent there. They’re probably collecting lots of information and planning to send my host family junk mail, but it’s worth it.

Last weekend was our Bing trip to Hiroshima. Helen Bing is apparently some really wealthy person who sponsors really nice trips for all Stanford’s overseas programs. So we shinkansenned down to Hiroshima, where we had a great okonomiyaki lunch (hard to describe�Elike a big omelet I guess).

We then went to the Peace Museum, which was larger and I thought more balanced than the one at Nagasaki. This one described a fair amount of Hiroshima’s history—including the military activities there during WWII. It was still stunning though; between the replica of the A-Bomb Dome (formerly part of the grand industrial promotion hall) reduced to a tattered frame and the stories, pictures, and tissue samples of bomb victims, it’s unconscionable to imagine how nations could stockpile thousands of weapons each up to 4,000 times as destructive.