On the morning of the 24th, we made our final preparations to get out of Pete’s place. Unfortunately, he had loaded too much laundry into the washer so Raynor ended up with shirts with big chunks of soap stuck to them and we both ended up with slightly less than clean clothing. It remains to be seen if this will be a problem. We biked over to karaoke where we rocked out to Linkin Park’s “Somewhere I Belong” (probably scaring our waitress) and got some sort of awesome boba / ice cream drinks along with some curry rice. That ended up being pretty expensive ¥6000+ in all. At the train station, I was yet again impressed by the politeness of Japanese people when two girls at Starbucks who manged to get ahead of us noticed that they had taken our desired seats and offered them back to us. When we refused, they still refused to sit down. We then bade Pete farewell and got on the bus to Kyoto. After an uneventful bus ride in which we found that both Angelica AND Kenzo had lost their phones, we met up with Angelica right in the most obvious place - in front of the giant train station. We went to their place which is about the same size as Pete’s apartment but more tastefully decorated. Although, they do have a shower that can burn you if you don’t turn on the sink water before you get in! We went out to dinner at an okonomiyaki place which put way too many bonito flakes on my slice of the “Japanese pancake”. That’s some false advertising if I’ve ever heard it. Then we went to sleep on tatami mats and blankets! It turns out Kenzo has taken a position in the PhD program at Kyoto university (3 more years? that’s pretty quick!) in the same lab as Angelica but in 3D simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) rather than gestural music recognition. Angelica has another year before she gets her master’s degree but isn’t sure what she wants to do after that. Maybe found a robotics start-up and go back to the US to Silicon Valley, whenever Kenzo gets done. Even though she took a 6 month Japanese course she still has had trouble making friends and misses home. She does not like the idea of Japanese corporate culture but will soon get to find out the reality at an internship at Honda.
The next day we all got up around 9ish and had some cookies and tea. Thanks Angelica! We rented bikes for the day. Incidentally, Raynor is starting to like biking. Then we headed to the international library where Kenzo studies and found a bunch of funny English help wanted ads. Angelica’s method of sightseeing is a little more unscripted than Pete’s and involves performing a random walk :). On to a smaller replica of the Imperial Palace here in Kyoto. We then went to Angelica and Kenzo’s lab where we played with their robots and met a few shy labmates. Then we went on to a zaru soba lunch.