June 6, 2003
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On Friday, we had three bicycles. One disappeared over the weekend, but that didn't really seem like a problem. We didn't use it much, and we didn't have a lock for it anyway. Then, on Monday, Patrick's bike got a flat tire. We were off in the middle of Kyoto and he had to ride bike on his rim. It was an inconvenience, and since our third bike had gone missing, it looked like it might be a problem. Later, I went to get groceries or something, and I got a flat too. That was irritating. We went from three bikes to zero bikes. It was definitely a problem.

With bicycles, it's very easy to get around Kyoto. Without bicycles, it is either difficult or expensive or both. It would cost us about six hundred yen a day to take the train to places we usually go to by bike, and other places we would just have to walk to. On foot, it takes twenty minutes just to get to the convenience store, let alone upper-central Kyoto.

Yesterday, though, Sachi, who we only slightly know, offered to repair the tires. She brought over a little kit and knew exactly what to do. I also learned that the Seika security station has an air pump for student use. That will be convenient in the future. Anyway, it took about couple hours or so to fix both tires and also Patrick's brakes. Sachi and I had started working on this while Patrick was still at soccer practice, but when he finished, he joined us outside the security station. He had a third bike.

There are so many bikes parked outside the dohokan that it usually takes us a few minutes to find ours. The one I ride has a distinctive lock, and after Patrick's tire went out, he took the lock off his entirely. So, he just grabbed the first bike he saw that had no lock and a flat tire. It wasn't ours, but we pumped the tire up anyway. If it hasn't moved in a couple days, maybe it will become ours, and we would be back up to three bikes. Not a bad recovery in under a week.

For today's field trip, we all climbed Mt Hiei. It took a while. It was bright and very warm out. I cut the top off Patrick's hat, to allow ventilation while still providing shade for the eyes. At first, I was trying to sharpen a rock to cut the cloth, but it wasn't working out. Eventually Alicson said that she had a knife. It's much easier to cut the top off a hat with a knife than it is with a sharpened rock. That occupied me for a while.

Patrick and I went to listen to Hiroshi's band again tonight. They have been recording their set, to burn a cd of, I guess. After they finished, we spent a couple hours trying to understand the entirely-English lyrics. Their English is not so great, so the meanings of a lot of lines were ambiguous or downright confusing. On top of that, a lot of them were metaphor or allegory, which added a whole other layer of possible meaning to sift through. They're all pretty good musicians, though.