I just returned from Kobe and had a wonderful time! (I thought it was time to escape from the dullness that tends to engulf Fukui). I will write more later, but I wanted to say that I was renewed in my belief that the Japanese people are extremely kind to strangers (and even foreigners who speak poor Japanese). Living in Fukui I had started to forget about that (maybe I had even grown cunical in the last week since my hit-and-run experience). But here goes my story of kindness:

On the train on the way to Osaka I offered the little old lady next to me a chocolate covered almond (for some reason I find all little old ladies in Japan very cute, they are so small and determined and very unlike older people in America). We started talking (in Japanese) and before I knew it she was feeding me bread and sweets and even sent me on my way with extra sweets for me and my friend in Kobe. I had a good time talking to her, despite not understanding the whold conversation.

Thursday I went to Arima Onsen by myself (my friend Ted was working). I couldn't find the onsen from the train station though because there were gads of buildings covered in Japanese writing and I couldn't read one of them. So I asked a group of girls about my age where an onsen was and they took me to one and made sure that I understood how to pay and got inside ok (you have do a funny thing with buying a ticket and putting shoes in strange lockers). Then after the onsen (which was very enjoyable) and lunch, I went to a public foot bath that is fed by the natural hot spring. I was sitting there soaking my feet when I was suddenly in a conversation with several groups of travelers who had just met there. Before I knew if we were taking pictures of eachother, having other people take pictures of the group of us, and I was again being fed. As a side note I have yet to figure out why the Japanese like to feed me so much. When I was first traveling to Fukui I met a woman in Kyoto who fed me, a woman on the bus to Nagoya one time fed me... I am thinking perhaps I look perpetually hungry, or maybe it is a grandmother thing, but the Japanese love to feed me, and none of my other foreign friends have that happen to them. After I finally parted ways with my new friends an old man asked to take a picture with me, a woman who is going to New York next week started talking to me on the street (we walked up and down the street several times before we realized that neither of us knew where we were going). As I was at the train station and starting to realize none of the signs were printed in English and I didn't have the foggiest clue how to get back to Kobe I ran into the first group of girls who had guided me to the onsen. It just so happened that they were on their way back to the same subway stop as me and helped me. I then went in search of a foreign food store (and marmite for John). I asked a woman in a store and she took me across the store to the information desk, and the woman from the information desk led me on a 5-minute journey through underground tunnels to the foreign food store (definitely outside of her call of duty).

I suppose speaking Japanese helps, but I was just blown away at how many complete strangers were so genuinely nice to me in the last few days. It really makes me want to travel more often.