More gaijin

After my day with Andy I spent the following day walking through three cities and six temples. Along the way I ran into a mother-daughter couple, also from Canada, who were making their fifth circuit of the island. The daughter is a lecturer in religion at a university in Kyoto. Apparently she has been in Japan a number of years, mom comes over twice a year for a visit, and they spend a lot of their time together walking around Shikoku.

The daughter's name is Catherine, and if you google her up you'll find a lot of references to academic studies that most of us would probably find terribly uninteresting. In person she was charming and bright and lovely. She and mom were wonderful companions for a few hours on that sunny morning.

At Mandaraji, we found three young men, American assistant language teachers in the city Miyazaki. They were like Adam cruising around the island by car collecting stamps. I never saw them again.

Catherine, mom and I said our farewells at Zentsuji and I haven't seen another foreigner since.

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