At the request of our beautiful Alyssa, I decided to update for you all. Nothing mind blowing, mind you, just what we got up to this past weekend.

So, Saturday, Aoki-san and Yuko-san came up for Kitakyushu to visit us. We didn't really have any set plans, so they decided we should go and hangout in Mogiko, a cute little port city at the top of Kyushu, really close to Honshu. It actually reminded us a lot of Victoria - we even saw a busker! We wandered around the touristy walkway right mainly. We saw a man with a monkey dressed up in cloths on a leash. The monkey would bow and clap and basically be adorable. We had lunch at this fancy Chinese restaurant (apparently my culinary palate isn't that great, since I couldn't tell the difference between Chinese food in Japan and Japanese food in Japan). There was also this really tall building that we went up and got to take in the view of the city as well as across the water to Honshu. There is a really gorgeous bridge that connects the two islands, as well as a underground tunnel walkway thing that I'm determined to walk through, because how cool is that? Walking underground from one island to another! All in all, a pretty good day.

Sunday, we met up with a friend, Andy, and a couple of people he'd met, and went to a cultural festival at a local women's university. The girls running the stands seemed to think that three white people where the most exciting thing in the world, and even despite that, the festival was pretty loud and chaotic, in a good way though. A lot of really good food. It was raining though, so that kinda sucked and after a while we found out that a lot of the performances were happening on the other days of the festival. After we were done there, we went to a batting cage of all places at my darling husband's request. We hit some baseballs (and by we, I mean that they did, as I think I only hit maybe two balls), and then we called it a night, deciding not to go to this dance party thing we were invited to.

For those of you not in the know, Tuesday was a holiday here in little ol' Japan. So Monday night, Andy came over and we played Settlers into the wee hours of the morning. In the morning we got up and headed back to the festival to see if we could catch a few of the bands that we'd not gotten to see on Sunday. We ate some more delicious food (one stand that we ate from clapped when we came up to it because they were so excited about the white people eating from them), saw some good (and not so good) music. Andy took off after that, so Dylan and I wandered around the area for a couple of hours since the weather was so completely gorgeous that day.

So, a pretty mellow weekend, but really good.