10/25/08
Nakatani Apartment, Nagoya

Today my host dad took me down to the golf place, along with Leona and Seia. We didn't go into the big driving range area, instead we went to a beat-up little green nearby. This was my first time hitting a golf ball with something other than a putter. We had an hour there, out of all that chipping I managed to get one ball technically in. Technically because the flag was lopsided and propped the ball with the edge of the hole so it didn't actually fall in, but I was assured that counted.

I didn't spend the whole time chipping, though. The kids found some plants with some nasty burr things, and decided it would be fun to whack everyone with branches. Throughout all my adventures in the US, I've never seen anything as evil as these things. They're small flakes, covered in some kind of abrasive superglue. Even one is hard to remove; if you can get ahold of it, the adhesive is strong enough to put up quite a fight. But there isn't just one, I had patches of hundreds on all the areas they had hit me with. You couldn't just brush them off, it was crazy. My fingers were bleeding before I had finished removing the ones I could find, the glue was strong enough to take bits of skin with it. Seia had such a great time with them that his dad was outside picking him clean for half an hour after we got home.

Went out to sushi tonight, I don't even want to think about how much it cost. Thanks, Nakatani family. After dinner, we went to a grocery store. I found a nifty 3D plastic jigsaw puzzle, an apple. When we got home I put it together while we watched the Chunichi Dragons (the local baseball team) get smooshed by the Yomiuri Giants (from Tokyo). A cleanup hitter named Ramirez hit a 3-run homer, and after he high-fived all his teammates, he did a spontaneous choreographed dance with an orange rabbit in a skirt. Japan can make even baseball interesting.

This rabbit.

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