Stoat - Where?

Last year’s and this summer’s visits to Kyoto are still some of the highlights of my time here, so I was happy to have the chance to go again this weekend with Brenna, a friend from work. We travelled up on Wednesday after work and planning to stay in a cheap hostel to make an early start on Thursday. With Gifu being close to Kyoto, I’d never actually stayed there before, but everyone had told me that it’d be easy to find somewhere to stay, and that the tourist information center would arrange everything for us. They hadn’t counted on the appearance of one Mr. El Presidente Bush, apparently here on some sort of trade mission, that is, forcing the Japanese to begin American beef imports again under the threat of raising tariffs for Japanese electronic imports. Although nobody really likes Bush here either, nevertheless, every hostel and hotel we found or phoned was fully booked.
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The weather’s been a bit rainy since I came back from Whistler, so I used that as an excuse to go and buy some snowboarding gear for the coming season. I got a board, boots and mitts. The sheer amount of choice kind of overwhelmed me to be honest, especially buying a pair of boots, but I’m satisfied that I’ve picked up some stuff that’ll last me a few seasons. It also kind of forces my hand on what I’m going to do this winter vacation! Although the exchange rate wasn’t as good as it could have been, the savings compared to both Britain and Japan were still pretty good. And they’ll be even better in a few months when I get the GST back.
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