About two minutes from my house there’s a nice little tree lined canal and if you follow it eastwards for about ten minutes or so it leads up to Tetsugaku no michi (The “Philosopher’s walk”). Now around this time of year, lots of couples head towards Tetsugaku no michi hoping to see hotaru (fireflies in English but “hotaru” sounds nicer I think) because it’s all romantic and all, innit. I’ve been up there a few times for a bit of a mooch myself (that’s “mooch” as in “gander” - not “smooch” as in “canoodle”), but I’ve only seen one or two at a time. Still I was pretty thrilled because I hadn’t seen any before this year. But then the other night, just by chance, I happened to be in the lesser well-known area of the canal that’s closest to my house, it was really dark (bit scary) and I thought I saw the light of a cigarette bobbing about in the dark and I thought “Aye, aye. Who’s that then?” but as I got closer I realised there was no one attached to the cigarette light and it wasn’t a cigarette light at all, and as I looked about me, up and down the canal, hundreds of hotaru, all blinking in and out and beaconing and beckoning and bobbing about and I thought “Wow. That’s really something.” and there were no smooching couples there at all, just me and some pretty amazing illuminations. I was quite moved.
It was kind of like this, only real: http://www.wingsee.com/ghibli/fireflies/characters.html
Last night I met up with Chie for a drink. Chie is pals with two lovely girls called Chiara who I studied Japanese with a couple of years back, and she speaks fluent Italian (which is pretty cool). She just got back from Roma where she was hanging out with Roman Chiara (Genoan Chiara is apparently in Fukui-ken right now getting all fanatic over the Taiko drums). Anyway, she said Roman Chiara (mia sorella!) was reading my blog (somebody is reading my blog!) so I should write something about meeting up with Chie, so I said “Well, alright then. Let’s take your picture.” So here she is:
That’s Chie on the left (and that’s the tip of my finger on the right).
Chie drinks Guinness (wow!)…
Ciao for now…
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