Dec 7, 2008

Visit from David

David is in Sendai for two weeks, visiting from Waga Waga, Australia. David is a poet and university professor who was here a year ago as a one-year guest faculty member at Miyagi Gakuin University. During that time, we frequently met after my Thursday morning class and talked about poetry over coffee. David was very incouraging about my efforts to write fibs.

Last night David and five others of the usual gang went to an Izakaya to eat, drink, and talk. During that very enjoyable evening, I tried out the camera in my cell phone, the one I will take on the Henro pilgrimage, under the difficult lighting in the little room that we occupied. The following two poitraits of David resulted.


The final picture shows Ian on the left and Gerry on the right. Gerry, who I do not think has shown up on this blog before, is a Scotish fly fisherman who plays the bagpipes but makes his living teaching English. As with the rest of us, his wife is Japanese.


In many Izakaya, the floor consists of tatami mats and the customers sit at low tables. This one has a feature that we all particularly like - there is a whole in the floor under the table so you actually sit as you would in a chair, not cross legged as on tatami. Also because the room was very small, the walls were immediately behind your back and you could used them as back rests.

I did not take a picture but a fairly disturbing feature of this particularly Izakaya was that the floors in the halls were made from some sort of transparent material, below which there was sand and objects that made it look like the bottom of the ocean. Thus, you felt like you were walking on water, or maybe air, a very eerie and uncomfortable feeling but interesting.

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