Night of The (unfortunately) Living Bugs

Excuse for lameness: I spent too long posting the pictures from the past couple days and now I'm too lazy to write about Osaka. It'll get up there eventually. Quick real post: This place is freaking crawling with bugs now that real summer's hit. Just going between the guest house lobby and my room, I

• saw a giant green bug with attractivly contrasting brown wings

• was attacked by something about 1.5 inches long which looked like the wasps I've seen lately

• found a round buggy thingy next to my shoes which I had to catch and throw outside of the room

• had to walk under the biggest dragonfly I've ever seen in my life. This thing could have easily starred in a Godzilla movie. I took pictures but they don't convey the truly horrifying scale of its hugeness. It was only a little smaller than my hand.

I haven't mentioned the cicadas yet. I didn't really notice them too much until last weekend since I'm not usually up and out in the world until about 10:00 and by then most of them are quiet. Most, not all. When you do walk past one of them, it's still pretty loud...but not like at 7:00 AM. At Matsumoto-san's house, I slept downstairs in the tatami room, which has paper doors. So when mmm would come and open all the windows, I awoke to the dulcet sounds of at least 20 gazillion cicadas buzzing their little hearts out. It's about the same volume as the background noise in a college bar on Friday night.

On a completely unrelated rant, I'm a complete freaking idiot. I went to Himeji to meet Dr. Shimizu this morning. After a miraculous 15 minute bed-to-door time (due to me sleeping 45 minutes after the alarm went off), I arrived at Himeji station at 10:15. En route I realized that in my haste I had neglected to take the post-it which had Dr. Shimizu's phone number on it from my desk. But since I was comfortably early, I didn't worry too much.

I went out to wait at the gate nearest to Himeji castle, just as instructed. And waited. And waited. At 11:00, I figured that I should call - but wait, that's right - I forgot the number. Fan-freaking-tastic. Maybe I was at the wrong exit.

After another fifteen minutes, it dawned upon me that Dr. Shimizu wasn't going to come around to the other side under the assumption that I was an idiot. Because I wasn't actually at the Himeji castle side at all. I was ass backwards. It took me half an hour to figure out how to get to the other side of the station (due to construction, this actually isn't too intuitive) and so at 11:30 I finally got to the correct place. But no Dr. Shimizu came running out of his car to greet me. I've never met this guy before, we don't know what each other looks like. I figured that him finding me (the only white girl around) would be a lot easier than me finding him (one of about 2,000 Japanese men.) Again, I was wrong. At 11:45, I gave up.

I went to get some Starbucks to keep myself from crying and went home.

As soon as I got back, I called him to apologize. Thank God (really, God, thank you!) that he has a sense of humor and just laughed it off. Still, not the best way to make a good first impression, unless you intend to look like incompetent at best. We're going to try again either Friday or next week.

Let's hope next time I'm not a complete retard.