Summer Holliers

Finallly on summer holidays now until the 21st. And I've now got a much needed break from classes. Unfortuantly, on the last day of work my body decided to pull a wobbly and left me feeling wrecked. So I spent the first three days of holidays feeling miserable. Thank feck I'm feeling better now. All sorts of thoughts had been running through my head about having to negotiate a Japanese health clinic myself and my vacation being ruined. On Sunday went out to Kyoto for a little sightseeing for the first time since I got here. Disappointed to find the two huge temples near the JR station that I'd visited before were covered in scaffolding and will be under repair until 2008. Poxy. Yesterday I finally gave up on thinking of excuses against getting one and I went and bought a digital camera. I got the Canon A80 and I'm pretty please with it, despite having only taken about two pictures. On the minus side, the viewing screen is pretty small, it takes 4 AA batteries which makes the camera pretty heavily (and no doubt it will eat through them really fast), and the movie mode is restricted to 320x200. On the plus side though, it's got a swivel screen (good for taking shots that aren't at eye level and it protects the screen) lots of features that can be either automatic or manual, a separate lens can be attached to the front, and it got pretty good reviews for the quality of its photos. So I hope it'll be ok... So Ronan arrives today and after that we're going to head at various stages to Kyoto, Nara, Hiroshima, Tokyo and Takayama. Plenty of opportunity to take some holiday snaps....