So I said that would be my last post. Well, I lied. Yahoo! is giving me free broadband in Japan one last time... at the airport in Tokyo. I spent Friday night making a mad dash to get the apartment cleaned up and back to Kyoto. Saturday I slept, shopped, and partied until I had to leave for the overnight bus. Apparently I missed a certain girl from Okayama getting completely wasted afterwards, but fear not, it:s all preserved on Tim:s camera...

I ate so well this weekend. Izakaya, tofu, (Japanese) McDonald:s, all-you-can-eat shabu shabu and sukiyaki, toast with Hokkaido milk jam, Mos Burger, Hokkaido beer, Hokkaido corn, and eel.

Maybe I should have been more concerned about the fact that the Lawson people sending my suitcase to the airport didn:t seem to know what they were doing. I told them clearly that I needed it to be at Narita for a flight today, and they asked me what time, and I told them. I had them look over the form. All three of the clerks looked at this form. I thought the extra attention would mean they should take care of any problems.

So I:m getting ready to go this morning and I get a call from Eiko. Lawson had my luggage sent to...the Stanford Center? Seems the form had the sending and receiving addresses switched, although neither the three Lawson people nor the takkyubin company thought it odd that a big suitcase was being sent from Nara with a return address of a JAL flight from Tokyo that hadn:t happened yet...

I get to the airport and discover that I can get the flight changed to tomorrow for free, and use Tim:s JR pass to get back to Kyoto for free to pick it up. So I:m all prepared to do that when Christine discovered that even though she had mailed stuff to the US already, her suitcase (and by suitcase, I mean body bag) was seven kilos overweight. The only way she could get it all back was if I checked a bag of her stuff.

Let me just say that Eiko is the bomb. She:s going to ship my stuff to me, repacking it into two smaller suitcases because it:s too big. And...she used her ninja powers of mind control to get Lawson to pay for it. So I:ll hopefully get my luggage back in two months.

Lessons Learned from the Japanese:

• Only one bathroom in Tokyo-eki is open at 6:30 AM. And the escalators down to it don:t work. Grr...
  
• All white guys look alike. Which leads me to my next point,
  
• Apparently, I look like Keanu Reeves (despite having neither the same color hair nor eyes) and JFK.
  
• White guys can:t use chopsticks either.
  
• You can fit a lot of luggage in 32 kg. But Christine can somehow try to bring more back.
  

Y:arrgh. But this time tomorrow I:ll be in the (dry) sun of California... whoo hoo!