It's getting hot, hot, hot

I love winter. I love the cold, the wind, the rain, and the overcast days. A girl I once dated told me that that was strange, so I usually don't confess this to anyone, but I find that over my past week in Kyoto, I can't help but think how much I wish it was winter right now. I was told that Kyoto is one of the three hottest places in Japan, which is no doubt due to the fact that it is located in the middle of a basin - adding to the absurd humidity level. That being the case, it makes my 40 minute bike ride to the law school I'm attending during the summer all the more joyful... which is a good segue into what I've been doing for the past week.

I've been attending a summer law seminar on various areas of Japanese Law. I've taken a similar class twice before, so I didn't have high hopes of intellectual stimulation leading into the event, but it turned out to be unexpectedly interesting. Having said that, the class wasn't limited to law students, and so we had a whole bunch of people from other disciplines - journalism, politics, nursing even. The rationale behind this, as in most law schools, is that universities try to promote a degree of diversity to the law students life, lest we become too egotistical. It's a failed experiment, in my opinion, because you need to have a fairly healthy ego to begin with if you want to study law. But I can deal with this. What I can't handle is the ever persistent (non-law) student who sits at the front of the class, asking the exact same unintelligible law-related question over and over again (3 times, to be precise). She was, essentially, America-bashing, which always annoys me in international relations/politics/law classes because on the whole, they're usually unacademic, illogical arguments that get reguritated every year by some 1st year politics student. But I digress.

Probably the best part of the whole week, though, was the people I met. One of the girls I've been flirting with for the past couple of days already has a gaggle of boyfriends, each nicknamed according to the car they drive - Mr. Nissan, Mr. Mitsubishi, etc. I was wondering what I would have been nicknamed had we dated... Mr. "I-borrowed -my-friends -bicycle-to-ride-to-uni" or Mr. "Bus-Route-205". Funnily enough, she went to the Toyota Factory on a uni excursion the other day - who knows what kind of hijinx she got up to while she was there. I was invited to go on the excursion, but I went there before on a business trip with the last company I worked with while I was here, and neither promise of heaven nor threat of hell could get me to go back to that den of tedium...

I'll be back in Tokyo soon, and I have photos...