Saturday (3rd May) turned out to be an interesting and somewhat painful day. I went to bed at a fairly reasonable time on Friday night so was up relatively early too. I played a bit of STALKER on ze compy and then headed up to Paone to meet my new friends at 3:30pm. These two guys are Christian missionaries, and while most people won't give them the time of day because of it, I think that they're decent people. And so long as they don't start trying to harp on about their mission to me, I'm happy to hang out. I'd met them at Minato-ya a few weeks before and we'd gotten around to talking about mountain biking, which they were fairly keen to get into. So I said I'd show them the trails at some point and Saturday was the day!

I took them up to Takayama, which is quite a challenging course. There's a steep climb followed by a lot of rocky downhills and stiff uphills. The boys ride their bikes for hours each a day as they go around trying to convert people, so naturally they are somewhat fitter than I am. As I was huffing and puffing slowly up the steep roads on the middle of the mountain, they were going along quite well. Until we reached the higher roads, anyway, hehe. At the top, I managed to find the trail that Minato-san had taken me on last time and we zoomed off along it.

The trail is a lot of fun and we I think we all enjoyed it, bouncing down the loose rocks as best we could and generally trying not to get mortally injured, hehe. I fell off three times and took some good damage to my legs, but nothing too serious. I think the best bit was on the final downhill, a long rocky zig zag with very sharp turns. On the way down that, we came across a lady hiking up it. Wynce was going first so had whizzed by her on a straight section, but I'd come across her on a narrow section where I couldn't ride past. So I jumped off and carried my bike past her, hehe. She looked at us with absolute incredulity, eyes wide with surprise :) She saw the blood on my legs told us all to take care. As Wynce put it so perfectly, how could she not be surprised? Three gaijin on a mountain in Ako, tearing along on mountain bikes down a narrow, sharp, rocky, dangerous trail that she seemed to be having enough trouble climbing up! Hahahaha. Very amusing. She managed to recover enough to tell us all to take care as we passed ;)

At the bottom we headed straight back into Ako. Wynce, who was a pro motorcross rider back in the US and had a decent enough bike to handle the conditions had done very well. The other guy, whose bike wasn't nearly as good, hadn't though, and he was a bit unhappy about it. I did warn them that the trail was tough, though! I think next time we might hit up some road biking and do some jumps somewhere instead, and maybe just Wynce and I will hit up the tougher trails. All in all, good fun!

Back home I quickly had a shower and called Nakashima-san to tell him I was going to be late to dinner in Himeji. The ride had gone later than I had thought and I couldn't make the train I had wanted to catch. In the shower, I cleaned up my injuries and discovered to my dismay that one of them was actually quite bad. I guess the sharp metal pedal had sliced through the skin on my leg when I'd fallen off the first time. The wound was quite deep and I wasn't entirely sure what to do with it, as it bled quite a bit. I was thinking I should probably head to the hospital, but in the end I decided to do the Australian thing and tough it out. So I just disinfected it and whacked a few band aids on it, haha. She'll be roight, mate!

Out in Himeji, I met Nakashima-san at just after 7pm. Thanks to me being late, we had a lot of trouble finding somewhere to eat as it was peak time and all the good places were packed. So we waited until nearly 8:30pm before we got into a great little yakitori place on the west side of Himeji. I found to my dismay that Nakashima-san had recently been given forced redundancy thanks to Hyogo-ken 'not having any money'. I was pretty upset about this as I think it's unfair, and Nakashima-san has two children to support. Thankfully he is on redundancy pay until October, so I really hope he can find a new job before then.

I shouted him to dinner, after which he insisted on buying two rounds of Guiness at Hosana. It was nearly 10pm by this time, so Nakashima-san headed home and I went on to Tiger Pub. Avi was already in there, so I had a great chat to her, and to Hisako too, who was working. I was thinking about doing an all nighter but eventually decided not to. A lot of people were away for Golden Week, some guys took my chair when I went to the bathroom and the atmosphere took a bit of a dive when some rowdy people came in, so I thought it best to just head home for the night :)

On Sunday I slept in then played some STALKER before heading out to Himeji to meet Yusaku and Kit for dinner. We ended up at the okonomiyaki place I'd been to a few months ago with Shannon and crew, which is expensive but fairly decent. From there we did some people watching (while squatting outside a konbini, very Japanese) and walked around a bit before Kit headed back to Osaka at around 9:30pm. Yusaku and I went to Tiger Pub and hung out for a while, but again the atmosphere didn't feel good, so I made the call to get out at around 10:30pm. After a little wander up to the castle it was time to head back to Ako. I dropped in at Sai-on but the boys were watching a Japanese comedy that I couldn't understand, so I didn't stay long.

On Monday my friend Junko was coming to stay, so I spent the morning tidying up the house and then filled in the rest of my time playing STALKER. It's a really good game! Junko ended up getting in at around 4:30pm, a bit late for our planned Ako History Tour, so we just went to the castle and then to Minato-ya for dinner instead. She was tired as she'd been camping the night before with friends from uni, so headed to sleep quite early. In the morning, we headed to Ako-pan to get some lunch and then she caught the 1:40 train back to Sannomiya. It was cool to see her again, even if it was for such a short time.

Minato-san had let me know the night before that he was going clamshell hunting at around 2pm on Tuesday, so I gave him a call and organised to meet him at his shop. After helping him get his sea kayak onto the roof rack on his car and stopping off at Jusco to pick up some cheap summer clothes (new shorts, w00t!), we headed down to a beach just to the west of Misaki. Along the way he told me that he was in trouble as his wife had just found out that he had two expensive mountain bikes. As he'd had them both at least since I first met him, I was surprised that he'd been able to keep it a secret for so long. Apparently he used to hide his other bike out the back of his shop, hahaha. I always wondered why he did that, lol. Crazy times.

Anyway, she seemed to have forgiven him and we all happily hit the beach. I'd remembered my sunscreen this time, thankfully, and whacked it on like crazy. I've been burnt enough (twice!) this year already. Minato-san and I took the sea kayak straight to the closest bit of (sandy, wow!) beach and powered our way around the cape to meet his wife and son on the clamshell beach. They were already digging through the rocks for the tasty little shells. I jumped out of the boat and joined them, but didn't manage to find too many ;/ Eventually, Minato-san and I jumped in the kayak and powered out to an island a little way offshore. We were going to dig for some shells there until Minato-san saw the sea urchins in the water and decided he wanted to eat some. So we spent a while digging up the dangerous little beasties with our oars and chucking them into the middle of the boat.

Back at the beach we did a bit more digging before finally heading off as the sun set. I'd found about 5 shells all up, but had also found the biggest one, hooray! From the beach we went back to Minato-san's shop to change and then up to the Ako Heights onsen. The water there wasn't particularly special but the onsen itself wasn't too bad and had a great view out over the beautiful Seto inland sea, right across to Awaji. We finished up there at around 7:30 and went for dinner at a kaiten sushi place I had never been to before. It's right near the university and isn't too bad. Much more expensive than Kappa Sushi, but nicer too. Definitely a place to put on the list!

Back at home I did some chores and got an early night, ready for school again today. Not that it really mattered, as all of ichi-nensei is away on a camp up north at Hachikita. So no classes for me today, hehe. I will have one class tomorrow, however, and two on Friday, plus I have some lesson planning to do for next week. So it won't be a complete waste of my time ;)