Not too much to report up until this week-ish. Mostly chilled out and then went into Shinsaibashi again this sunday, we decided that we didn't go to Osaka enough. Johnny's store made me giggle a lot. Made an extremely nice visit to Kiyomizu at night, two actually, one with Elizabeth and one with Tomosuke. It is an incredibly beautiful place, and even more so in the fall lit up at night with all the brightly colored leaves. I feel really lucky that I was able to see it. Exams are coming up, another distraction from enjoying the random adventres of Japan, but oh well. I will miss Elizabeth when she goes home, I'm sad she wont be here for the spring semester. But we will get Elisabeth from ASU so I guess you win some you lose some. But next semester I'll be in homestay so hopefully that will do something for my evening loneliness tendencies so they don't return.

But this weekend we took Elizabeth's mother up on a extremely generous offer to pay for a hotel somewhere we would like to go, and we went to Kinosaki Onsen which is north in the Kyoto prefecture and by the Sea of Japan. We stayed in a real ryokan and went to no less than three different onsens in town while were there. Not to meniton bought the worlds cutest plushies. There were 7 different onsen but we were only there for one night so there was only so much we could see. But we had traditional Japanese cuisine for dinner and breakfast, some of which I liked some of which I didn't. But there was a LOT of crab for dinner, as its the regions specialty. God it was good. And the onsen were so relaxing. I will have pictures of the town as soon as I catch up on picture uploading, which keeps getting delayed by tagging. We did however wake up this morning to snow! I didn't think I'd get to see snow while in Japan, as Osaka is a snow free-to very small amount of snow zone. But we were lucky ne? Nothing quite like getting into a outdoor onsen in the snow (and for those of you who don't know, in Japanese hot spring's you wash off and then go in completely nude in the seperate mens and womens bathing areas). The whole thing was really fun the the yukata they gave us to wear were surprisingly warm and really comfy.