Day 10: part 1 - what to do on Friday?

I woke up quite late today. This was especially inconvenient because I wasn't sure what I would do today. Three options lay ahead of me.

The first was to go to Sakaiminato. It is a city in the country-side in the far west of Honshu, the main island of Japan. The reason that I wanted to go there was because there is a special museum to a favorite son of Sakaiminato, Mizuki Shigeru. A few people had discouraged me to go to Sakaiminato because of its distance. However, it is that very fact, that people were discouraging me from going, that made me want to go. That said, two things were working against me going here from the very beginning. The first is that the city is so remote and out of the way that the train ride to get there is quite long, and involves many transfers. It would have been four hours, and three transfers. The other thing that was working against this trip is that I had already gone to a museum exhibition of his work in Osaka the previous day. Having seen that exhibition, and since I am not especially interested in his work, it seemed that the trip to Sakaiminato just wasn't in the cards.

The other option that I wanted to explore today was going to Wakayama. One of my students is from Wakayama, and she was really trying to sell me on going there. In fact, after looking at websites and doing some research on Wakayama, it was a very beautiful place with several outstanding sites and features. However, while Wakayama City was only about an hour away, many of the beautiful features of Wakayama prefecture were quite far away, and really deserved more than a day trip to visit. Unfortunately, it did not seem like this was the right time to go to Wakayama, either.

The third option as to what to do today really came out of the blue. A couple of years ago, I worked with a stage director during a musical theater festival in New York. Like these things go, I connected with him on Facebook, but we never met face-to-face ever again. By chance, he posted on Facebook that his current show was having its premeire in Osaka this week. When I saw this, I quickly emailed him and noted what a coincidence this seems to be, and that I would love to stop by to see his show. He told me that he would be happy to have me, and that he would leave a ticket for me for the 2:00pm show on Friday.