I spent the weekend in Okayama visiting Karen and Ben with Tim, Audrey, and Audrey's coworker Emma. Saturday consisted of traveling down there just in time to go shopping in the classy covered arcade. This one had a Virgin record store with a whole wall of "Dance and Black Music". I don't know how they get away with that level of un-PCness (nay, racism) here, other than the lack of customers that speak English or are black. Then we walked Okayama's officially designated Romantic Walk, which starts with the charming post office and runs a full block to a fairy-tale FamilyMart. There are, of course, lots of color-changing neon signs to inform you that this is, in fact, the Romantic Walk.

After a great dinner at a little Korean place we introduced Emma to the bread-and-butter of Japanese nightlife, karaoke. At...the United States of Karaoke? Apparently it's this place where every room is a different theme, say like the all-American Little Tokyo, Chinatown, or Canadian Rocky rooms. My favorite was the Detroit room, so distinguished by its dirty look and steering wheel mounted in the wall. We ended up in what the clerk informed me was the Santa Fe room. Alas the United States of Karaoke only had a United Kingdom's worth of English-language music, but this was made up for by the biggest stock I've seen of Japanese-language American musicals. Now Fantamu obu za Opera ranks as my favorite translation. And for the first time in karaoke I found I Got Rhythm--in Japanese no less! Ah, that brings back memories...

And so in one night we saw the entirety of Okayama's downtown. The next day we saw a garden that ranks as one of Japan's top three (very nice, although what the heck's a rice paddy doing in the middle of it?) and returned to Kurashiki for the novelty of shopping in really old-looking buildings.