Stoat - Where?

I live next door to the third largest Buddha in Japan, but despite living here for coming up on 17 months now, I still haven’t found the time to cross the street and see it. Instead, today I went 2 better and actually saw the biggest one up close in the city of Nara, which was once the capital of Japan. I’d planned this for some time and decided that I wouldn’t let my non-near-death experience yesterday stop me from going. It was also a good opportunity to use up the 青春18切符 I’d picked up when Mum was here. Nara is a perfect day trip from Gifu, as long as you don’t mind a bit of travelling. The journey involves a change at Maibara and Kyoto and takes about 3 hours in total. Luckily, all the things of interest there are pretty close together and you can do the majority of the city in an afternoon.
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I was crossing a small side street this morning on the way to work, when a car pulled out of a blind side-road and hit my bike side-on. Neither of us were travelling too fast so it wasn’t a big collision, but I was knocked off and my bike was crushed pretty badly. Fortunately, apart from a few grazes and bruises, I wasn’t hurt, but just a bit shaken up. The woman responsible was really upset and must have said ’sumimasen’ about a thousand times. She insisted on calling the police, even though I told her it wasn’t necessary, but I’m pretty glad she did now. This is the first accident like this I’ve been involved in and for it to happen in another country is pretty unfortunate, so I wasn’t really thinking too clearly.
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