Classes today were held in the practice facility on the second floor of the women’s dorm, which contains one very large room (dozens of mats; the largest standard tea room has eight) and a 4.5-mat room in one elevated corner, open on two sides to the rest of the hall. Our morning lecture was on Noh theater: an elderly American expatriate who performs with a Noh school here in Kyoto walked us through some of the basic postures and movements, which of course are very stylized, awkward, and difficult, and nothing at all like the way we carry ourselves in the tea room.

After a fish lunch, we continued our bonryaku practice, today with Imagawa-sensei, who patiently attempted to get me to sit up straight while keeping my arms and shoulders relaxed. At least I was more confident with the basic order of the procedure than I was yesterday, and for some mysterious reason, my knees held up comparatively well all afternoon. We had beautiful sweets called sakuramochi: soft and sticky pebbled balls of translucent pink mochi wrapped in fragrant green leaves. The slender hanging bamboo flower vase held a little red tsubaki bud and an elegant twig of yukiyanagi studded with tiny white blossoms. All in all, it was a lovely afternoon–our most enjoyable and encouraging practice so far–and I bounced up to do my chores in a mood as merry as yesterday’s was morose.

Supper featured a breaded fried egg. Later, Sean and Szymon and I sat down together to have a beer and study a bit. Unfortunately, before we got to the studying part of our plan, Almerindo knocked on the door with beer of his own, the conversation ran wild, and Szymon ended up producing a dangerous succession of liquors from his personal stash. Innocent little tastes in sufficient quantity lost their innocence, and we all stumbled off to bed in conditions most unsuitable for a school night.

At lunch we met two of the female Midorikai students who have been here since September. Tanja and Verena are both from Finland.

After lunch (chicken katsu), the new students gathered at the Urasenke center to fill out a round of paperwork. We met, in passing, one of our teachers, an American named Gary-sensei, with whom I may have gotten off on the wrong foot–or hand, anyhow: when I gave him my standard firm American handshake, he quietly but curtly warned me not to squeeze so hard. Bouncing off a plane from the Czech Republic and into the office was another new student, Nadezda, who goes by “Nadia” for simplicity’s sake.

Then we were led to the local ward office to register as resident aliens. The bureaucratic machine here looks and operates much like it does back home; it was like going to a DMV where I didn’t understand 95% of what was said to me.

After dinner (some sort of fish), Tanja and Verena led us to the women’s dorm and persuaded the vigilant attendant at the lobby desk that the men were there with only the most honorable intentions. Then we got to see their own second-floor tea practice room and cast-off stuff collection, and the room full of dōgu (tea implements) that we’ll be able to use for our own ceremonies later in the year.

On Szymon’s recommendation, after dark I returned to Nijo castle with Sean in tow. A huge crowd had lined up outside to pay a 400 yen admission fee: during sakura season, the castle illuminates its trees and some of its structures for a nighttime celebration they call “Nijo LightUp.” The path through the grounds is chosen with care to create a sense of pacing. Entering through the giant gates and turning left, we first found one little pink-blossomed tree glowing in the walls’ corner beneath a spectral guard tower. Then a restrained row of trees; then larger clusters, larger trees. The ones with bigger blossoms were crowd favorites, and everyone pressed close with camera phones held aloft to get pictures.

Down one path, tea ceremony was being demonstrated in the castle tea house, but Sean and I decided to skip it, following the majority of the visitors past a pond where a particularly lovely sakura hovered delicately over its reflection in the still water. The tour’s grand finale was a long straight lane between rows of giants, old trees that had grown to overhang the path almost completely with their branches: a dizzying barrel vault of floral lacework.

We exited through a makeshift market where food and souvenirs were peddled from brightly lit white fabric pavilions. Happy families huddled on benches in the cold with steaming bowls of udon noodles; Sean and I bought skewers of hot, chewy dango balls dipped in a sweet and savory sauce before hiking home up Horikawa-dōri through the finger-numbing night.