Public Service Announcement at the End

I'm going to have to pick up the pace a little on this blog posting.  I am only just now getting to Golden Week Part III but there's a lot of stuff that's happened since Golden Week!  And I have a feeling it's going to get even more adventurous for the next few weeks.

So, to speed things up, on Friday of Golden Week, my work friend took me to "Urami no Taki" which is a wild flower preserve/nature trail leading to a waterfall whose name literally translates to something like "View the Back of the Waterfall" because the trail leads around behind the waterfall and you can see the back of it.  Except that part of the trail was closed, so we could only view View the Back of the Waterfall from the front.

We spent the day hiking and exploring the area, and we also went to the New Tea Festival, where they celebrate the first green tea harvest of the year with live music and lots of vendor booths and snow cones.  We took a hike from there across a bridge to a lake where you can ride a duck-shaped boat, but when we got there, there was no water in the lake and no duck-boats either!

But the bridge was cool, and the hike around the dry lake was fun and beautiful.  And we ended the day with an all-you-can-eat dinner.  It was an excellent day!

In the span between this hiking day and today, there have been quite a number of fun bromantic dinners, trips to remote desert ice cream stands, late-night-on-the-town antics, life-saving hard-disk file-recoveries, shopping trips, and work antics.  If I put them ALL in this blog, then I won't have anything to talk about when I get home, so I'm just going to post a few quick pics.

Ice cream.

Bromance.  Italian and Japanese and German, in perfect harmony.

No caption necessary.

Old-fashioned erotica.

This old-timey robot brings us our coffee at work.

Ok, that should bring everyone up to speed.  Now, on with the Public Service Announcement.

I am going to be in Bloomington on June 28th.  This time it will be for more than 12 hours!  I think congratulations are in order.

And that's the real reason I had to bring you up to speed with what I've been doing up to now; my schedule has gotten decidedly busier since all of my friends found out I'm leaving them behind for a while, so I will have lots more photos and antics to post in the upcoming days, I'm certain.