Back from OBON Holidays

Just got back from OBON Holiday in Okayama at my wife's house. Nothing too exciting as usual. Didn't do shit actually, except play with my sister-in-law's kid in the kiddy pool, she's quite a funny kid.

It was too fuckin' hot to do anything else really. This summer in Kansai is record breaking, hasn't been this damn hot since 1960 or so. It's been a hot year everywhere I think. At least I don't have that damn heat rash this summer. Anyway, we all just ate, slept, drank, etc etc., showed wedding photos to various relatives, which got pretty tiresome after awhile , considering we had about 3,000 pictures between her parents and us. That's not even including the actual wedding photos, which we're still waiting to get back. Arrrggghhh!!!

OBON week. What's the point? Everyone takes the same damn holidays in Japan. As a result, it's always busy, almost impossible to get tickets for the Shinkansen unless you reserve them at least a month in advance, people everywhere, traffic jams, stress, anger, extreme heat and humidity and more stress. Spending money on all this crap and souvenirs for dead relatives so that their spirit will come back and visit.

But at the same time, I usually do enjoy it in some weird sort of way. Christ, I must be getting more used to this culture than I think.

The most enjoyable part of the trip this time was hanging out a bit with my wife's grandfather's brother, who does traditional style calligraphy called "shodo" or "shuuji". I got a lesson from him on how to write the 3 different popular styles which are "kaisho", "gyosho" and "sosho" which you can see examples of if you hit the previous link. Watching him made it look easy as piss, but when you actually take a stab at it yourself, you realize it takes years of skill to do it properly...