Goza was great

Hey kids. I’m back from a near week long joint around Southern Kansai and Chubu taking in the sights and sounds of an oppressive Japanese summer.

Some highlights, with more to come later:

A white sandy beach covered in hundreds of umbrellas you had to pay $10 to sit under, with touts telling you to sit under them. Sitting between them was not permissible.
A fireworks cabinet so packed to the brim with pyromaniacal explodey goodness it would make the most hardened rocket fanatic break into a grin.
Did I mention the beach? You could swim there. It was glorious.
Japan’s most sacred shrine. So sacred, in fact, that every twenty years they essentially burn it to the ground and rebuild it from scratch. Last time it cost around five billion yen. That’s a stack of cash but it is, however, less than the amount the government spent building a bridge to an island inhabited by seven people. There’s a mirror inside the shrine, covered in layers and layers of cloth bag, that no living human has ever seen or is ever likely to see. Rituals, they do them good here in Japanland.
Asashoryu trouncing Miyabiyama to maintain a 10-nil lead at the Nagoya Sumo basho. The crowd cheering, then promptly leaving. Me secretly wishing I had my own Sumo nappy.
Coming home, turning on the computer and finding that, inexplicably, the b,n and enter keys no longer worked. At all. So I can’t login or use my laptop for anything until I somehow find a USB keyboard on the cheap.

Once I get over that last hurdle, I’ll throw some photos at you. Be ready to duck.