It's been a good couple of days! Monday at school was pretty painful, but that's normal when the students have tests. Hah, who am I kidding, it's normal every day at the moment, hehe. Thankfully after the tests have finished, I should get at least a few classes! To fill in my time, I studied some Japanese, edited some photos, read some photography books, generally zipped around on the Internet and confirmed my nenkyu for the Toyota seminar with Kyoto-sensei. I also asked for a day of nenkyu for Tuesday this week, for two reasons. Mainly because it was a great time to take it given the lack of anything to do at school, but also because it meant I'd have the chance to ride with Minato-san on his day off. I hadn't been riding in a long time and wanted to hit up Shobudani.

Once 4pm finally ticked around (I was reduced to reading webcomics by this point!) on Monday, I raced home and then shot out to Himeji to meet a new friend of mine, Kazuyo. I'd gotten to know her on, you guessed it, MHP :) She works at the Starbucks in Himeji and her messages were always very amusing. I was really happy to find out she was like that in real life too! She turned out to be super genki and a lovely person, so I was very glad I'd met up with her. I took her to one of my favourite little places in Himeji, a tiny yakitori place. It has this miniscule, mysterious entrance that leads down some dank, dark stairs to an wonderfully designed room and awesome food. We ate, drank and talked there for quite a while, and then headed to the Chum for some late night coffee.

Again I was surprised at how good our conversation was. Her English was much better than my Japanese, but we talked in both and I did fairly well I think. She's just been granted a working holiday VISA in Australia, so there was plenty to talk about in relation to that. Looks like she's going to start in Brisbane and work her way all around Australia! Lucky little devil, hehe. Mind you, I can't talk, being here in Japan =) Anyway, it got to 11pm really fast and we had to catch our last trains out, so slowly made our way back to Himeji station and home. It was a great night, and I really hope I can catch up with Kazuyo again some time.

Tuesday was a pretty groovy day too. I caught up with Minato-san at around 11:30am and we rode up Takayama mountain near my house. A bit of a challenge, but I could feel it doing me a lot of good, so I was happy enough. We got some mad downhill action in over some rough and at times gravelly terrain before finally getting to an absolutely enormous slope. We were far too scared to ride down it (it seriously was insane) and even had a lot of trouble just walking down it with our bikes. About 3/4 of the way down though, it leveled and flattened out a bit, so we zoomed down the last part like maniacs :) After that we rode to Sakoshi mountain. I was able to make it all the way up this time without stopping, but it was a serious challenge! :)

Once at the top, Minato-san showed me a new trail he'd found. It had two massive uphill sections in it that he was able to ride most of the way up, but I couldn't get anywhere near so far. The combination of hybrid tyres, a low seat, a cross country bike and general inexperience meant that I'd only make it about 1/3 of the way up and then have to push my bike the rest of the way. If there's one thing I hate, it's not being able to use something in the way it's supposed to be used. Having to push my bike up a hill that was so steep that even just walking up it without a bike was difficult, was just a massively frustrating experience and I got quite upset about it. At one point, against my better judgement, I half pushed/threw my bike away from me in despair. I calmed down quickly enough though, and kept on going, but it wasn't a nice experience. I guess I'll just have to practise some more!

Once we finally reached the end of the trail, we turned around and came zooming back down the hills we'd just climbed. Although I didn't feel it was worth the effort we'd expended to get up them, the ride down the hills was damn fine! We got some serious speed up, whipping and zooming between trees and doing mini jumps over rocks. Back at the top of Sakoshi mountain, we went down the difficult mountain trail I'd stacked it on the first time I went biking with Minato-san. This time, although I didn't manage to make some of the turns, I felt much more in control and did a lot better. Minato-san said he was surprised at how much I'd improved, both uphill and downhill, so I was really happy about that. I still slow him down a bit, but much less than before :)

We finished the ride by zooming down some stairs, bouncing along like crazy. If anyone saw us, they surely must have thought we were out of our minds, haha. I love mountain biking, it's a totally awesome sport, and really good for fitness. Once at the bottom of Sakoshi mountain we rode back to Minato-ya and then grabbed lunch at Kappa Sushi. It was nearly 4pm by the time I got home, so I did some chores, played around on my computer and then headed out for dinner with Hiro and Julie. We went to yet another new place in Ako, Dolphin, which does 'Japanese style' steak. It's pretty damn good - a steak set has a good amount of meat, a salad, rice and soup, and it's only 1,100 yen :) Wheee! Now I know where I can get a cheap steak fix if I don't want to go all the way to Kobe.

During dinner we talked about various things, the most interesting of which were some upcoming festivals. These are often hard to find out about, so I was very grateful to Julie Anne for keeping me up to date. There's a sweets festival coming up at some point in Spring in Himeji, a boat race in Aioi that I've been invited to watch from a party boat that Julie Anne's boss owns, a little food festival near my house and much later in the year, a big party at the local Mitsubishi factory, where Hiro works. Very cool :) This really just hammers home to me how important networking is. If I hadn't talked to Julie Anne, I wouldn't know about any of these things and my life would be much less exciting. That's true from taking chances with almost everyone in Japan. You can't win out every time, but more often than not, striking up that conversation is going to be rewarding in some way.