The rest of the day was a hazy succession of naps punctuated by feeble attempts at writing email and editing video. At least the weather reverted suddenly to cool and dry, so I was able to enjoy a fresh, pleasant breeze blowing through my room. After school, Sean let me have some rice and miso and pickles to make soup with. Anita stopped by with bananas, water, and a vitamin drink. Almerindo brought me a big plate of delicious watermelon, which I ate in the bath. I was touched by the attention, and by mid-evening was feeling more like myself again.

I concluded the evening by consuming a medicine that Szymon and Sean prepared from the following: fresh-squeezed lemon juice, honey, and Polish vodka. Served hot. Quite efficacious, in its way.

I had plenty of frozen and refrigerated sandwiches to get me through the morning and afternoon, and for supper we pooled our onigiri and topped them with mabodōfu that Tanawat whipped up.

I went to bed sensibly early, having energy for no other course of action.

My dad phoned to chat: a rare treat. Sean got up eventually and we went to the post office and the dōgu shop with Anita. (Too poor to buy anything exciting, I just replenished my supply of kaishi paper.)

Later, Sean and Tanawat and I visited the dōgu storage area in the women’s dorm to get a sense of what all is there. Though we’d visited the room several times, we’d never really taken a thorough look around the place. We’re planning a farewell chakai for our senpai, and need to choose dōgu. And when our senpai leave, it’ll be up to us to know what resources we have available.

Szymon brought home four big chicken katsu bentō from the 250-yen place, and I bought curry roux from the grocery store. We microwaved the rice, reheated the katsu in the toaster oven, and put it all together in bowls with curry sauce for a cheap, easy, delicious meal. Meanwhile, Tanawat, who’d gotten inspired when we’d hatched the homemade katsu curry plan, made green Thai curry with chicken and coconut milk, which we ate with reheated rice from disassembled leftover onigiri. So we all ate two kinds of curry and then felt too full to breathe properly.

Later, Sean, Szymon, and I wandered around Video in America but didn’t find anything we felt like renting, so we returned home to watch the kooky show Sean and I had discovered on a previous Saturday, about the Japanese chess game called shōgi. I felt wiped out, though, and I had an ominously sore throat, so I checked out (relatively) early.

A sticky morning in samue, cleaning tatami and picking up leaves in the roji garden. We finished just far enough ahead of schedule to be able to watch one of the mizuya boys (ten-year apprentices to Oiemoto) rake the gravel garden outside Shinka no ma into shape, starting with long parallel sets of grooves, finishing with concentric rings radiating from the boulders on which he perched in his wooden geta sandals.

Home for the second shower of the day and the change into kimono. Then lunch and the sick last-minute realization that I’d made the rookie mistake of not bringing my fan; it was still in a pocket of my samue and I didn’t have time to go fetch it. I felt naked without it all afternoon, but at least I was able to borrow Sean’s for my aisatsu (greetings) with Verena, the chaji’s host, at the beginning and end of the function.

Verena’s chaji was a lovely thing. The afternoon was so dark that I could barely see across the room. The warm, wet, still air somehow seemed to me to confer an extra intimacy to the gathering, and heavy rain fell periodically to provide hypnotic background noise. In the machiai, we tasted hot water from kumidashiwan cups decorated with a tsubotsubo pattern and served on a tray with the “spinning top” koma pattern. As “last guest” (makkyaku) at the chaji, I was responsible for distributing and collecting the cups, as well as for working with the first guest later to return dōgu to the host after haiken. The first guest at a tea function has the hardest role, as I learned last month: besides having to make intelligent conversation with the host, he or she has to know what to do and when, without being able to just follow the example of the guest ahead, like everyone else can. The last guest is second-busiest, and also has to have a certain amount of tea know-how; he or she is the errand-runner in the group.

Verena chose for her tabakobon in the machiai a Finnish basket woven of birch bark, bearing a Chōsen Karatsu hiire. The tabakobon in the koshikake was handled, lacquered a deep red, round–but actually finely-faceted, not truly circular. Ichō leaf shapes were cut out of its high sides. Its hiire was a porcelain butter container from Germany.

We made our way through the roji during one of several fortuitously-timed breaks in the rain, and slid into the tea room to admire the scroll, an elegant piece of calligraphy by Daisōshō that referred to an old Chinese Rip Van Winkle-like legend. Verena used a tall unryū kettle on a ceramic furo, and a wooden mizusashi shaped like a square well bucket (tsurube) with hinged lid; these give a cool feeling for summer and are the appropriate vessel for temae using famous water like the kind we drank today, drawn in the morning from Nashinoki Jinja. She brought in her charcoal for the shozumi procedure in an aburakago basket, and used a little woven-bark incense box. Her habōki brush was made of owl feathers.

Then she served sweets she’d made herself: bean paste wrapped in folds of mochi that she’d named “White Night.” Their shape was reminiscent of the butterflies that grace Finland’s summers, when the sky stays bright throughout the night. She’d used a little brown sugar in the bean paste for a very nice flavor a little different than what we’ve gotten used to.

The rain stopped in time for our return to the koshikake-machai for a break, and resumed after Verena called us back for koicha. She’d taken down the scroll and hung a boat-shaped bamboo hanaire carrying a beautifully arranged white tessen blossom. All of the dōgu she used passed through my hands, but the room was so gloomy that I could tell very little about them. Verena made koicha in a Seto bowl and a colossal heavy beast of a red Raku with deeply scored sides; Sean observed that it probably could have held enough koicha for all the guests in attendance. The tea was scooped from an Oribe katatsuki chaire with a chashaku named “Kagura” (sacred dance), carved by Oiemoto. The tea itself was a Kanbayashi variety called “Ryū no Kage”–shadow of the dragon–that went with Verena’s dragon-patterned kobukusa.

Before moving on to thin tea, Verena served dry sweets she’d also made herself: fine sugar pressed into water shapes and rolled-and-cut green maple leaves flavored with a hint of ginger. She brought the tea, Yume no mukashi from Ippōdō, out in a funny little ceramic natsume in the shape of a miniaturized Korean kimchee jar. Its large loose lid made a nice tinkling scraping sound when it rubbed against the body of the vessel. The first chawan was a wonderful warped Shigaraki; following were a shallow red Raku hirajawan, a white idokatachi bowl by an American artist, an Iraho bowl that felt very nice in my hands, and a bowl with a Raku-like shape that I took a closer look at the next day, in good light, to discover that it was glazed in an unusually bright rainbow of colors–its interior was a beautiful shocking purple.

It was the third practice chaji for the April students, and for me the most enjoyable yet. Though certain points remained a little confusing, we seem to have grasped the general outline of the chaji, and so were able to make our way relatively smoothly through it, enjoying the tea, the toriawase, and the company. After concluding with our formal farewell to the host and a wrap-up session with Hamana-sensei and Gary-sensei, we switched on the lights, cleaned up, packed the dōgu and returned them to the women’s dorm to be cleaned and put away properly later.

Nobody seemed to have the energy for a dissolute Friday night, so we (shudder) watched, at Szymon’s request, the lousy “comedy” How High in Sean’s room and then chatted until a look at the clock made us think we should get some sleep.

I dragged myself out of bed early once again and rode into the mountains, this time straight up the promising road I’d identified the day before. Alas: it didn’t lead much farther than I’d already taken it, or reveal any more than I’d already found. Past a small remote cluster of houses, it narrowed to a gravel path forbidden to any but locals–and I’m the sort of guy who generally obeys signs, especially under circumstances like these. A small disappointment but a nice ride regardless. Now I have to decide on the next direction to explore.

The whole school dressed formally and assembled in the biggest of the second-floor classrooms to hear an address from the principal, who is of course Oiemoto. For me this was an exercise in patience, sitting up straight and looking alert for an hour and a half while not understanding a thing that was being said to me. Heck, I could barely hear any of it to begin with: Midorikai, typically, sat at the back of the room, and Oiemoto’s microphone didn’t compensate for my worsening hearing. Gary-sensei has promised to provide a rough translation when he’s deciphered his notes. Our senpai tell us that these lectures are usually pretty interesting. Oiemoto graduated from Dōshisha with a degree in psychology, and his interests extend far beyond tea.

A hot afternoon in the tea room despite the air conditioner running. Ro-sensei clearly felt the heat too, mopping himself frequently with a hand towel and opening every window he could find to open. Despite the air conditioner running. Another in the series of kazari temae today, this one showcasing the chaire.

Then I went to war with a bowl of ash, and lost. In 45 minutes, I started my haigata, got disgusted and destroyed what I’d done, started it again, gave up, started once more, and gave up for good. Threw around my haisaji a bit for good measure, and got worried looks from the Japanese students fighting with their own haigata. I might have calmed myself down and finished the job except that I knew it didn’t actually have to be done until Monday, so I’d have the opportunity to come back to it with a better attitude.

I walked out of school into the aforementioned downpour, ate quickly, still in a foul mood, and retreated to my Fortress of Solitude to pull myself together with the help of some strong air conditioning. Restored equilibrium and spent the evening quietly.

Naturally, the community I’d discovered the day before was somewhat less enchanting on the second visit; I worried as I rode through it that I’d oversold the place in my blog entry. Still: a world apart from the city, and a wonderful mountain setting. As I curved around the hill to the north, though, the population density increased and retail reappeared. Then I happened across a golf course, and decided to turn back; I was bored, and knew that the road would soon lead me back around to the south, where I’d already been on foot.

But because I had some time left (the return trip was a very speedy downward slope), I decided to try the only fork in the road I’d found on my way out. Past it, the asphalt grew even narrower, the grade steeper. Now there was no community at all–just occasional houses, all old, generally with unusual amounts of clutter in what yards they had. No cars up on blocks, but I wouldn’t have been surprised. Between the houses, long stretches of forest. Mysterious chained-off gravel roads: probably logging access once upon a time. The furthest into true wilderness I’ve managed to get in this country.

I ran out of time before I ran out of road, and planned again to return for further exploration. I sped (for real, this time) back home and changed into western clothes. No lectures today, but a field trip!

We met at what looked like an old Japanese-style house sandwiched between storefronts on Ōmiya street near Daitokuji. This was, in fact, the workshop of the Nakajima family, who for three or four generations now have been doing wonderful things with glue and paper. They are the official mounters of scrolls for Urasenke; they also make sliding paper doors for tea rooms and other traditional applications.

Despite its old-fashioned styling, the building is almost new. We entered through a small reception area and climbed a flight of stairs to the second floor: one big room of wooden floors and giant exposed rustic beams and an air of good work being done tidily. At least two generations of Nakajimas and the rest of the staff of fewer than a dozen greeted us most enthusiastically; they seemed genuinely happy to have us visiting. I’ve never gotten such a smiling reception in similar circumstances: not here, not at home.

And then we learned how a piece of paper becomes a scroll. It takes a lot of thin glue and a lot of paper. Using a brush, the mounter saturates a sheet and affixes it carefully to the back of whatever it is that is to become the scroll, using a separate brush to work any bubbles or wrinkles out. Then the process is repeated: the extra layers and glue pull flat the original, which is generally thin calligraphy paper that has wrinkled after the application of ink. The mounter uses yet another kind of brush, a big, heavy, stiff-bristled one, like a meat tenderizer, hammering the paper to break the fibers so that it will roll up later without creasing. Then the paper is left to dry. We got to try our hands at gluing. It’s tricky work, but every other part of the process is trickier.

The dried paper-sandwich is glued together with various precision-cut pieces of other expensive papers and fabrics into an incredibly complicated sort of jigsaw puzzle with all overlaps measuring about 2 mm, and a last layer of paper backs the whole. I’ve been looking at these things for over a year now, and never had any idea what all was in them. A shaft and hanging cord are attached to the top; a thicker weighted shaft (jiku) with protruding knobs to the bottom. (The scroll winds around the jiku; when hanging, the weight keeps it straight.) We watched one young lady make little tassel decorations for the vertical strips called fūtai: she sewed six pieces of thread together, unraveled the ends, bunched them up just so and went snip snip snip with a pair of shears, and ironed them flat into perfect half-moons. Like magic. Another employee, the newest apprentice, was busy doing the new apprentice job: making custom boxes for each scroll-in-production. I don’t have the patience.

We were sent on our way with more smiles and an invitation to come back if we ever did any calligraphy we wanted glued flat. My legs hurt from an hour and a half standing in slippers that only accommodated half of each of my big feet. But it was worth it for what we learned, and for the chance to see such skill on display. (And anyhow, Gary-sensei likes to remind us that if tea doesn’t hurt, we’re not doing it right.)

Afternoon practice upstairs, where, for the first time this season, the air conditioning was operating. It didn’t exactly keep us cool, but it was a major and most welcome step in the direction of coolness. Temae of the day was a koicha procedure called chasen kazari, used to call attention to dōgu, usually the mizusashi, that has some special connection to the 1st guest. I liked it: it’s done without a tana, so everything but the furo and kama is taken out in the end, which appeals to me aesthetically. And because it’s not very different from the most basic koicha, it’s a good review of things that I’m attempting to make second-nature.

Class ran late, and on the one day when several of us actually had to get somewhere in a hurry. We raced through tatami cleaning without going home to change out of kimono first, threw back our suppers, and put on nice shirts and slacks for the evening.

Then Sean and I, followed a few minutes later by Tanawat, rode over to Dōshisha University to meet Tanja, Nadia, and Anita.

To see a free concert.

By the Yale Whiffenpoofs.

It’s not just the (almost) all-expenses-paid year studying tea in Japan. It’s also all the random unexpected stuff that comes with it. Like free tickets to see the Whiffenpoofs.

I’ve long been aware of the group’s existence; I’m not sure that there’s a more fabulously silly made-up word in the English language than their name. I’d known of their reputation for excellence. Now I know they deserve it. The Whiffenpoofs sing astonishingly well and put on a fun show. The very competent Dōshisha U. Glee Club, which sang a few numbers, just couldn’t compete. We hung around for a while after the concert to meet the Whiffenpoofs before I rode home with the boyz to prepare for the next day’s temae.

I got up early for the second day in a row and went on an aimless walk over to the Kamo river.

We met Matsunami-sensei in the Urasenke Center conference room. “I had a terrible stomachache yesterday,” he said. “And diarrhea.” Much lip-biting and staring hard at the table. “Many people suffer from diarrhea,” he added, and I almost passed out from holding in laughter. I fought hard to stay awake while he slowly reviewed the history of Daitokuji. Then he led us upstairs to the private Sen family Zen temple and eroded the last of my patience with Buddhism. (Apologies to the many good and sincere people who go in for it, of course.)

It was a long session this time; I meditated on how wretched it was to be sitting seiza in a stuffy room for untold minutes, sweating, wanting to clear my throat. At one point Matsunami-sensei rose to provide a Special Meditation Service: anyone who asked could be beaten with a stick. I am, as Dave Barry used to write, not making this up. Sensei walked slowly around the room with an enormous flat stick; if a student bowed as Sensei passed, he’d stop and give them a terrifically loud but reportedly not-so-painful shoulder-flogging. I chose not to take advantage of the offer.

The pain in my legs was just approaching truly intolerable when Sensei clacked his wooden clackers together to signal the end of the session. I pried myself out of the seiza position and used my handkerchief to blot the sweat from my hands that had collected in little beads on the polyester lap of my kimono. Then I realized that we weren’t done yet. Matsunami-sensei was leading us around the perimeter of the fifth floor in some kind of walking meditation: everyone single file, matching deliberate steps with the student in front of him.

After two or three circuits, we returned to the temple room. And sat down again. I’m not certain that Matsunami-sensei didn’t fall asleep at some point during all of this. I sat, and sat, and sweated, and hurt, and did not achieve enlightenment.

And then the session was over.

Of course my legs were no good for the rest of the day. On the upside, I managed to complete two not-completely-hopeless flower arrangements by myself, in time, and–I realize that no 31 year-old male should be proud of this–without losing my temper or almost crying with frustration, both of which have been the norm until now.

More kinin kiyotsugu koicha, but I was last in the practice rotation and we ran out of time before I ever got to make tea. Given my feelings on this particular temae, I didn’t feel too cheated.

Another aimless walk after dinner that took me again to Funaoka Hill, where I discovered on the north face a park that I’d missed on previous visits, with a curious little concrete amphitheater that would have looked desolate except that several of the many people enjoying the evening in the park were sitting on the benches, conversing. I wondered if the stage is ever used for performances of any kind. I thought that if I ever bought a cheap guitar here I could just show up and start playing.

There was just enough time between the walk and bed to check the email, talk over the next day’s temae with the boys, and have a beer with Sean on the roof.

I set off to the west through the empty streets, aiming to find out whether or not there’s hiking access to the hill with the character for “big” cleared into it: one of the giant mountainside characters that will burn in the night at the end of the bon festival. When I reached the lower slopes of the first mountains to the west, I realized that I was too far to the south to find my answer on this trip, so I skirted the southern slope and realized that I’d found the neighborhood of Kinkakuji, the famous “Golden Pavilion,” and Ryoanji, home of one of Japan’s most famous dry gardens.

I visited both places in July of 2006 on a rainy overnight trip with my host parents, who sprung for a room in a rather nice ryokan near Heian shrine. We did a round of sightseeing, checked in to the inn and changed into yukata, casual lightweight summer robes, hit the bath, had an old-fashioned fancy Japanese dinner, and went to bed before nine o’ clock, because my host parents are elderly and don’t go in for nightlife–not that there’s much of that near Heian shrine anyhow.

The three of us shared a single room; an attendant had laid out futon while we ate dinner. Because of the strange surroundings and the early bedtime, I woke up again around midnight and couldn’t get back to sleep for a very long time. I remember that my very small pillow felt and sounded like it was packed with dried beans; every adjustment of position crunched and rattled in the close dark space while my host dad breathed loudly in his sleep.

Kinkakuji underwhelmed me. The big draw is a smallish pagoda covered in gold leaf. Slightly garish. Ryoanji was better, except for the giant noisy crowd of tourists both foreign and domestic on the porch overlooking the ancient rock garden. “Don’t look at it with your eyes; look at it with your heart,” my host dad told me. But my heart was busy disliking the tall, neo-hippie American in his Patagonia gear chatting up the local girls; he looked like the classic Not-Religious-But-Spiritual and Cherishes-Traditional-Cultures-the-World-Over type. We lunched at the restaurant on temple grounds that serves just one dish: an exquisite tofu in a delicate broth. You walk a wooded path to get to the place, across a little stream filling a bamboo cylinder that empties itself when its center of gravity shifts, and you eat in an air-conditioned tatami room with a large loud party of Americans at one end and an attractive Japanese girl at the next table whose underpants peek distractingly from the back of her jeans.

I returned home and changed, and gave thanks for clothes that fit properly. On Friday after school I’d picked up my brand-new made-to-measure kimono, and now I got to wear it. True, it’s not as nice as a piece of work as the more expensive garment that the school gave me, but it’s a much better thing than the oversized ready-to-wear kimono I’ve been struggling with for the last month and a half.

Hamana-sensei lectured on tea in the month of July, and Tanihata-sensei breezed in to resume his history of tea in Japan, getting us right up to Sen Rikyū.

For a treat, we got to practice in the afternoon on the third floor, which meant that we didn’t have to carry the two heavy furo and their iron kama downstairs and then up again after class like we do most days. We worked on the koicha variation of kinin kiyotsugu, which I like even less than the standard usucha. First of all, I just don’t care for this kinin stuff at all. Second, koicha means sitting longer, which means more pain. Finally, making koicha for one person at a time is difficult: the volume of tea and water required is so small that it’s hard to whisk properly. Hard to drink, for that matter–most of it sticks to the bowl.

A confused little bird, the kind called Japanese White-Eye in English, flew across the room and into a pillar. It lay dazed for a moment, then took off straight into another pillar. Verena picked it up gently and held it out of a window, but it wouldn’t or couldn’t fly away, so she set it down on the top landing of the fire escape stairs. I forgot to check whether it ever recovered and got away.

After supper I resumed my search for access to the character on the hillside. Doesn’t seem that the public can get to it after all, but my time wasn’t wasted. Skirting this time the north side of the little mountain that is apparently called Shōzan, I came to a place where the houses end and a narrow winding road disappears into forest gloom. Occasional incongruous fluorescent street lamps arched over the road; it looked like the path to a modern Japanese Narnia. Beyond the guardrail, the ground sloped sharply down to a shallow, brisk stream cutting through green shadow.

When I stepped back into late sunlight, I was in a Kyoto I’d never seen before–if it was still Kyoto. Pockets of rural-looking houses and other buildings nestled between forested slopes; I saw cords of firewood stacked in yards. Whatever businesses might have operated in this satellite community were closed for the day, and few people or vehicles appeared on the streets.

Where the road disappeared into the woods again, I turned around, resolving to press further into the mountains sometime on bicycle, when I can cover ground faster.

After two lengthy adventures on foot in one day, I didn’t have to make a special effort to go to bed early. I futzed around online for awhile, tried to help Szymon get the sense of some difficult words in an English translation of some opaque ancient Japanese for the thesis he’s revising, and called it a night.

So Yūki is back, and we met for a late lunch at CoCo Ichi, which in Hawaii we usually call just “Curry House.” I’m hoping that he’ll be a good guide to the city, especially as college students can usually be counted on to know where to eat and drink and play for cheap.

We’ve established a new weekend dorm ritual: everybody hoards breakfast onigiri all week, and on Sunday night we pool them and use the rice to make a common dinner. Last week it was simple fried rice, tonight it was Korean bibimbap. Sean turns out to be pretty handy behind a stove.

I considered watching Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade in Japanese, but opted out after 15 minutes or so in favor of an early bedtime. I meant to make the following morning an early one.

The Raku museum is a small, tidy, classy place with shoe lockers and slippers provided, and a really cool anti-theft locking umbrella rack. I’m a fan of small museums at which I can see everything without getting exhausted. Here there are just two rooms. On the ground floor: 15 chawan. Upstairs: a small assortment of other ceramics, including a second Chōjirō bowl.

The prototypical Raku bowl is glazed black, though red glazes are also quite common; they have a color close to terra cotta and often develop interesting black marks in the kiln. Periodically you’ll see white or blue Raku, sometimes with crackled glaze. There is a basic shape associated with classic Raku, a sort of squat cylinder, but the main thing is the technique–a Raku bowl isn’t thrown on a wheel, but rather roughly modeled and then carved into shape with a spatula.

I realized, looking over so many fine specimens at the museum, that I really don’t give a fig for anything but the black bowls, but that the black bowls speak to me very deeply. The ones by Chōjirō were magnificent, almost metallic, with rusty discoloration that I took to actually be rust–perhaps iron in the glaze oxidizing over the centuries. A bowl named Isarai by Tanaka Sūkei, Chōjirō’s successor, was cup-shaped, smooth and compact in matte grey-black. I loved the bowl by Tokunyū (Raku VIII), a steep cylinder, but I wondered how difficult it would be to make tea in (and drink tea out of) it. Keinyū (Raku XI) was represented by a bowl in two subtly different shades of black meeting in the kakewake technique; one of them glossy, showing pinpricks of (under-glaze? clay? something lighter, anyhow) through pores like a star field.

Upstairs was a wide, shallow serving bowl by Keinyū, grey with a dramatically bent bamboo handle, that further convinced me I liked his particular sensibility. Likewise Chōnyū (Raku VII), who seems to have liked copying Chinese things. He made a tall cylindrical flower vase inspired by some sort of prayer wheel; only a true cretin would say that the pattern of raised bars reminded him of the interior of the Death Star. The other great piece by Chōnyū was a Chinese-inspired square incense box sculpted with a intricate pattern of deep ridges. Unless that was actually a Chōjirō piece–my notes from the afternoon are less than perfectly legible.

Ryōnyū (Raku II; I don’t know how this dovetails with Tanaka Sūkei; must be an interesting story there) was responsible for a blue incense box with an uncharacteristically detailed araisō design: a Chinese-looking fish thrashing in stormy waves. There was a ceramic natsume, grey with rusty spots from the kiln change, by Kōnyū (Raku XII); I wondered what it would feel like to use it for usucha after the light lacquered wood ones I’m used to. And for no readily apparent reason, there was a lovely lacquered bamboo incense box not by any Raku but by one of the Nakamura Sōtetsu.

I wish dearly I could have taken photos, but a sign on the wall at the entrance clearly warned, “Taking a picture makes it refuse.” I wish also, of course, that I could handle all these things that were made to be handled. Shō ga nai. Nothing can be done about it.

Then, hungry, we headed east to Kawaramachi, getting only slightly lost on the way, to get lunch at a place recommended by Szymon, whose appetite has proved a fairly reliable guide to food in this city. Nor did it disappoint this time. A small storefront open to the street. A table with three varieties of boxed bentō lunches on it. Fairly enormous bentō lunches. FOR 250 YEN APIECE. One guy behind a register at the back. Grab extras from his counter: big meatballs in sticky shōyu glaze; enormous chicken katsu filets for 150 yen each; croquettes. Take what you want, pay, leave. Feast.

What choice did I have after that but to nap?

Later, the usual 4 (as opposed to the Fantastic Four, I guess) set out at dusk to meet Anita and Tanja to walk to the river to set off fireworks. This is probably technically illegal, but we figured we could get away with following the example set by the other people on the riverbank setting off fireworks. And the people doing it in the median of the road to the river. We ignited monster sparklers and enjoyed the surprisingly cool evening and had a great giddy time in general. Verena, who had made her own way down to the river earlier, found and joined us; it turned out that she’d actually made her way all the way into the river, somehow falling in on accident. But she’s the sort who takes things like that right in stride.

Then home to show Reservoir Dogs to Szymon, who hadn’t seen it before and who I thought might find a little Tarantino violence cathartic after the day he’d spent locked in his room, editing a 50-page paper for one of his university classes in Poland.