Today was Monday, May 22nd. Once again, I awoke early – even after being rather tired from the adventure of the day before. I lounged around in my room until it was time to leave for Shiraishi sensei’s class at 9am. The day was sunny and quite warm as I walked with Jay Zimmerman and his “crew” over to Honbu. I worked once again with the guy who was hanging out with Jay – I wish I could remember his name, but I just don’t remember!

After training, I went back to the inn and showered in order to meet Mark O and a few other folks at a small pub-style restaurant near Jusco at 1pm. I was the first to arrive and when I mentioned that I was meeting Mark there, they ushered me into one of the tatami rooms to wait. I was surprised to see SS (you can figure this out…go on…give it a try!) arrive shortly after, followed closely by Cathy, Paul, Greg and Paul’s student Glenn and then Mark. We sat, chatted and ate a tasty, inexpensive lunch.

After saying my goodbyes to Mark, I made the short walk to Mr Donut to meet Roger and Lauren. From there we spent a couple of hours wandering around Jusco. I picked up a few more gifts and another shirt or two until I had to leave to head to Umesatou to meet Ted for dinner before the evening’s training.

I hopped the train for one stop south and waited for Ted at the station. While waiting, I observed a gaggle of high school girls who were also waiting for some cohorts. I found it interesting to see that four of the five were wearing their school uniforms while the fifth wore her “normal” clothes. I put that in quotes because she was dressed quite provocatively and had that strange makeup that many of the girls were wearing now. The look consists of some kind of silvery stuff applied to the bridge of the nose as well as other bright eye makeup on top of her tanned face and wild, highlighted hair. I guess it’s a take-off on the [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ganguro]ganguro[/url] thing from a few years ago.

Ted showed up after a bit and we walked down to a Chinese restaurant that he had never tried before. It was a nice place, not at all like most Chinese restaurants here in the States. This was more like a Denny’s or Friendly’s or something like that. Very clean and restaurant-like. We ordered what we could figure out on the menu and chatted about life in Japan, training, etc. The food was great. Probably closer to real Chinese dishes than we can get here. Having plenty of time before we needed to leave to get to Someya sensei’s class, we talked a lot and had some dessert as well.

After arriving at the Someya dojo and getting changed, we were greeted by Jay and his crew and the Croation group again. There was also a guy named Larry who had been living in Japan for 10+ years who seemed to be a regular at Someya’s classes and acted as the translator for the evening. Class began and we went through the series of basic ukemi with which Someya likes to begin. All rolls were done on the hardwood floor (the mats had been stacked away in the corner just the week before for summer) and I was reminded of the weaknesses of my ukemi. Sensei then had us work on a different way of getting up from our rolls in order to dodge an incoming shinai. That was fun and enlightening as well. Then we moved on to [i]san shin no kata[/i] and [i]kihon happou[/i] done with a partner. From there, we worked on [i]Musan[/i] from SFR for the majority of the evening. The night ended with some [i]kenjutsu[/i]. After we got changed, we all sat down for some tea while getting a chance to chat and look around the doujou. I spoke with Larry until it was time to go. Larry was nice enough to give several of us a lift back to the station in his brand new minivan.

I hopped the train back to Noda-shi. Called and spoke with Robyn for a while and then went to the inn and hit the sack.