Oh, damn; it seems that part of my Amazon order didn’t ship right away, and I bought so much stuff that I didn’t notice. It arrived today, at the Lawson Karasuma-Gojo, and is being held for pickup.

[Update: got a volunteer. Also, it looks like the package arrived while I was still in Kyoto, but my ISP had a hiccup that kept me from getting the notification in time; now that I have all my email, I see multiple “hey, it’s waiting for you” messages]

No energy to transfer pictures of the sun setting on the bay tonight, but the cruise was quite pleasant, and the Spring Happy Steak Viking was delicious.

Sadly, Nunobiki Falls did not work out, because when the cab driver said it was near where he was dropping us off, he kind of left out the 3/4-mile hike down steep trails that Mom’s knees wouldn’t even attempt. However, it was quite lovely up there, and he did come back for us as promised. And it meant that we got to drive by Even More Cherry Blossoms, since Kobe was in full bloom.

Full size phone-cam shot here.

[trip report update: some rain, some colds, and some knee problems for my mom have adjusted our plans a few times, but still having lots of fun, and my sister was delighted to belatedly discover that there was a place with delicious katsu curry udon a few blocks from the hotel (one more reason the Citadines is the perfect hotel…). Katsukura Tonkatsu was a big hit with the folks, as expected, and now we need to search the kitchen district in Osaka for the really cool sake pitchers they had (the store they buy them from had only one in stock, and couldn’t order more for us). Lattonzolo D’oro was decent Italian, the dinner at Gion Hatanaka featured two pretty maiko, and my winning streak at their drinking games continues. Cherry blossoms are ranging from barely-budded to overflowing (or, in terms more familiar to anime fans, from DFC to Kyonyuu), making for lovely scenery. Kimono-clad cuties also provide lovely scenery, of course, although the rain cut down on that a bit.

I haven’t been into Osaka Denden Town at all yet, but finding out that book 17 of AsoIku includes all the short stories from the BD releases means that I don’t have to go looking for used copies. Other shopping means that it’s a good thing I didn’t load up on figures, etc. There’s one small item I still hope to acquire in Osaka, though; I doubt I’ll have time to search for a figure of Rio in a duck suit, but perhaps I can at least persuade the Duck Tour folks to sell me a Kappa-chan as a consolation prize.

Saturday, we did some shopping on Teramachi-dori, and one of my stops was at a shop that sold hand-painted fans. The girl working the counter was very happy with me, because when I picked one and she pulled out slightly different renditions of the same design, I usually said “yeah, I’ll take both”. I significantly increased her sales for the day.

Sunday, we went to the craft market at Kamigamo shrine, and as I was walking past a booth of glass jewelry, the vendor ran out and greeted me, and, sure enough, it was my fan girl.

The purpose of a camera strap is to keep the user from dropping the camera. The cheap little rivets holding this piece of shit together fail miserably at this task. Fortunately the camera only fell a few feet onto asphalt, rather than, say, off a cliff or into the ocean.

For future reference, when you have a bunch of stuff shipped from Amazon Japan to the nearest Lawson convenience store, you need to enter two numbers at the kiosk, the 12-digit delivery confirmation number and the last 7 digits of the order number. The error page was a little kanji-heavy for me, and the girl at the counter didn’t know, either, so I had to make an extra trip.

Fortunately, convenience store locations are… convenient, and it was only a block from the hotel, across Karasuma. With a 30-day free trial of Prime (and business-class tickets that allow multiple heavy suitcases for free on the trip home), it was definitely worth doing. In fact, I just placed another order.

Sadly, it only works for items sold directly by Amazon, so the Marketplace dealer we ordered the snake booze from is shipping to the hotel, and I had to carefully parse their address and paste it into Amazon’s form. In a few days, we’ll see if it worked.

(by the way, blogging is painful because I’m running a VNC session over a VPN to my Mac at home, but I thought one sakura picture needed to be posted)

Straight from the camera at full size here.

Official cherry blossom predictions.

The extended forecasts have been getting warmer and sunnier over the past few days, so we may get lucky.