Remember Yosuke, one of my private students?  He likes metal.  He likes Helloween.  http://www.helloween.org/index2.html

Remember Shuichi?  He's my best friend at the Kyoto University Fencing Club and really likes my parties.  He keeps asking me when I'll have another.

Yukari, on the left, is a Japanese girl who wants to teach Japanese to foreigners.  She lived here for a little while but then left because the place was a bit too loud for her.  Liz, in the middle, is from England.  She stayed at Nova for like 10 months before returning home.  A nice girl.  And on the right we have Alan looking his finest.

On our way to meet up with Kyle and some other Nova teachers on July 4th, Mizue and I saw these folks watching Akira by the Kamo-gawa.

I bought this for like six bucks at the convenience and I totally expected it to be the best thing ever!

I got everyone's attention for this disappointing display.  Bleah.

The rest of these pictures are from Shosei-en, a walled-in garden near my house which I should've visited long before.  It's beautiful!  From the brochure:  "The elegant Shosei-en Garden . . . is also known as the Kikoku-tei, the Orange Grove, after the kind of orange trees planted on its grounds.  The garden is originally said to be built on the Heian Era site of the Rokujo Kawara-in mansion of Prince Minamoto no Toru, the son of Emperor Saga, in the late ninth century.  The prince made the pond resemble the rustic Shiogama seacoast of distant Oku province (Oshu, present Miyahi prefecture, northern Honshu), and is even said to have brought in seawater from Namba (Osaka Bay) to give the pond its finishing touch.  Later, in 1641, the shogun Tokugawa Iemitsu presented a large parcel of land, which included the garden site, to the Higashi Hongan-ji.  In 1643, Sennyo Shonin, the 13th hereditary heir to the Hongan-ji tradition on the Higashi side, commissioned Ishikawa Jozan to create a garden.  This marked the beginning of the Shosei-en Garden.  In 1858 and 1864, fires swept the grounds, reducing its structure to ashes.  But in 1865 and continuing on into the early years of the Meiji period (1868-1912), the buildings, as well as the pond and the magnificent stone wall, were restored to their original condition, as we see them today.  Finally, in 1936, the garden was designated a national historic site."