"Gosh Jack, what would the ethnic minorities think?"

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Evening lords and ladies,

I'm sitting on the floor in a Hiroshima youth hostel and it's 12:52 in the morning. I laaaast wrote...when I was in Tokyo I think, I wrote when I was spending the night sleeping in a manga cafe (which was awesome by the way, I feel asleep watching weird science on the PC while playing streetfighter II on the PS2). The morning after that I gathered my stuff up from my hostel and hopped on a train to Kyoto. The train system here is really good, a lot like the swiss rail, punctual but deadly... I got to my Kyoto hostel mid afternoon, and promptly fell asleep on one of the youth hostel sofas. I was rudely awoken by Beck and Alice, who entered the hostel at about 6, found me asleep on the sofa and smacked me on the stomach to wake me up! Rude. We spent...three days in all in Kyoto, every day we rented bikes and rode to all the major Kyoto landmarks 😊. There wasn't really anything deeply interesting, the sights we went to see all seemed to be very controlled...like you were guided round the set path to view the attractions, but you couldn't differentiate from the set path otherwise they would get pissed off. The only amusing thing that happened while we were visiting the landmark temples n'things was when we were ambushed by a group of Japanese high school children who needed to interview westerners for their english class. It was very cute seeing them giggle over trying to ask questions in english and afterwards they gave us a homemade card saying thankyou for helping us, it was very sweet.

I've got really into a manga series called "Death Note" it's seriously brilliant and fantasticly drawn. I bought the first two books (of 9) and I HAVE to buy some more while I'm still here. The blurb is "Light Yagami is an ace student with ace prospects - and he's bored out of his mind. But all that changes when he finds the Death Note, a notebook dropped by a rogue Shinigami death god. Any human whose name is written in the notbook dies, and Light has vowed to use the power of the Death Note to rid the world of evil. But when criminals begin dropping dead, the authorities send the legendary detective L to track down the killer. With L hot on his heels, will Light lose sight of his goals...or his life". It sounds really corny just from the blurb but seriously, its a fantastic read, all the stuff about the death penalty being justified or just more murder...it's really cool.

We made a whole bunch of friends at the Youth hostel in Kyoto, Danny the slightly niave but very nice 19 year old american backpacker, Kimberly the stunningly gorgeous aussie girl, Lucy the English lass living in Japan for 2 years, George the really tall french guy who was obsessed with Manga and Anime and a few others who I sadly have already forgotten their names. The night before last we all curled up on the hostel sofas and watched Spirited Away together, it was really nice 😊. Today we caught the train to Hiroshima, got here about 4, went out for a really delish italian meal and then went to a public bath and had a really gooooood wash in the jaccussi, sauna and ice bath 😊. It's really strange being in Hiroshima...like...Its so hard to comprehend that such a big place could have been a radioactive wasteland 60 years ago. It just looks like a regular city... Something that really made me laugh when we were catching the tram to the hostel, we were coming up to a station and the tram speaker said with an american accent "We are now approaching the ATOMIC BOMB peace museum" - the exquisite irony!!! It's like having a Arabic accented english tour guide to the World Trade Center memorial!

We're gonna stay for one more night in Hiroshima, then go on to Mount Fuji for a day, visit Becks uncle in Nagoyama, then back to Tokyo for our last few days in Japan. My flight back to China is on the 26th and my flight to England (via Moscow) is on the 28th.

See you all soon!!

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