Trees' Company

The day after coming back from DC, I went down to the Botanical Gardens in Brooklyn for the Sakura Matsuri. As you can see, the flowers in Brooklyn were still a good few days off being really mankai, but they were still very pretty, and seeing as I'd not been to the BBG before, it seemed like a good way to waste a Saturday afternoon when I really should have been working, and to tell everyone about how the meeting with Abe had gone. As you might expect, there was a fairly strong contingent from JETAANY and related organisations; one could also spot a sizeable number of what must have been anime geeks dressed up as ninjas or wearing weirdo black and white numbers (if you've been to Harajuku on a Sunday afternoon, you'll know the kind of thing I'm on about. See below for reference).

The weather held, luckily enough, and it was even warm enough for me to get a little bit of a tan through the intermittent cloud cover. Kate and I left around 4 after a little stroll through other parts of the garden; it's very pretty, and well worth a repeat visit, though living where I do I obviously don't get down there that often. Parenthetically, I grew up with the Durham University Botanical Gardens at the bottom of our garden way back in the mists of time, so maybe I'm a bit blase about the whole botanical thing...

We went to see Hot Fuzz that night. It owns. See it.

Tuesday I had dinner at Kai, a very swish Japanese place on Madison Av., as part of a gathering in honor of the recipients of the Honjo/JAANY scholarship I mentioned a while back. The food, as is often the case with the really upscale Japanese places in NYC, was excellent, but there was nowhere near enough of it, and I wound up getting a slice of pizza on the way home. The people there as reps of JAANY were pretty much a who's who of business in the city; two CEOs, two partners in city law firms, a VP at Merril Lynch...you get the picture. And there was me as a scabby, impoverished graduate student trying to work out what the hell to talk about, but everyone there was really nice. And, of course, I actually got my hands on the money...

I'm told that this blog has achieved a measure of fame in the last couple of days, since it was discovered by one of the guys I talked to at the DC reception, and forwarded on to the Japanese embassy, which then proceeded to send the link to all of the consular offices in the US. All I can say is, it's a good job that last post wasn't anything like most of the previous 256, or most likely my ass would have been grass by now. I don't quite know what the procedures for impeachment of a JETAANY president are, but I'm in no hurry to find out.

And while we're on the subject...what the hell? One comment on that last post? I meet with the Japanese PM and all sorts of important people - probably the single most interesting thing that's happened to me in the last two years - and that's the best you lot can muster in response? You do realise that the entire diplomatic staff of Japan in the USA now has me pegged as billy-no-mates? Jeez...