Possibly Incommunicado

I've worn out my welcome.

After a few nights at my aunt Fusako's house in Osaka, I've been evicted.

Err, ok, it's the start of the week and they need to start getting back to their normal life instead of entertaining me and my mom. It's kind of a bummer because my cousin's little seven year-old, Riho, and I have become BFFs. I even swung by her school earlier (school on a Sunday? Yeah, it's Japan!) to watch her in a school play, but they changed the schedule around and I missed it.

Walking back from the school, though, we serendipitously ran into my cousin Kenji, who was headed over to the house. I haven't seen him in ages, but it was nice to see him all growns up. And in the time since we last saw each other seven years ago, his English has improved far more than my Japanese has. How embarassing for me.

Ken's giving us a ride in his funky little car (called a "Cube") over to Shinosaka station. There, my mom will get on a bullet train headed to her hometown in Kochi prefecture. Makoto and I are headed to Kyoto, before moving over to his mom's (my aunt Hiroko) house in Kuzuha, a town just in between Osaka and Kyoto.

Aunt Hiroko doesn't have any internet access, and I'm working on the assumption that - being a less modern place - I won't have someone's Wi-Fi to poach, so I may be doing all my posting offline and sending chunks of updates. 'Til then...