Yatta!

In Nara, i ended up walking around with Sire (pronounced "see-rah", the girl from Norway) and another couchsurfer named Ulrich (a German man who lives in Wales). We went for late night visits to a few temples, an impromptu tour guided by a Japanese interior designer named Hiro. I've been seeing a lot of temples lately, but there's still enough variety in each one that makes it worthwhile. My favorite in Nara was one on top of a hill filled with the soft light of paper lanterns
and you could see the city sitting in a sort of bowl made from the hills around it.

Anyways, i was telling them about my bad luck concerning the camera and how i should be getting good luck because of the "best fortune" thing. I pulled out the paper and read it to them.

Then i noticed for the first time that it says "the lost item will be found"! I was suddenly hopeful again for finding my camera. Spurred by the encouragement of the other couchsurfers and this paper, i spent the better part of yesterday exploring the insides of two police stations trying to find my camera.

To make sure the camera was mine, i had to describe what kind of pictures were on it. I remembered that there was a few pictures of me eating ramen ("ramen tabe-mash-ta!") so i told the woman who was at the lost and found wicket.

She giggled and made a phone call. She giggled some more as she talked, then asked me if there were pictures of cooking.

Yes! Yes, there were! Ones with huge flames! Like this:


I was getting excited. Did they find it? I asked her.

Maybe.

She hung up and pointed to another police station on the map. A 25 min walk away. She wrote a little note in Japanese that i needed to show. I thanked her and left.

At the next station, i showed the receptionist the little note and she led me to another wicket on the second floor. The two women behind the little window looked at my face and giggled and seemed to be unsure. One of the women retrieved my camera (success!) from a filing cabinet and showed me the picture they were comparing me to:


Ha! I laughed out loud. It was the first picture i took with the camera. Somehow i always manage to take pictures like this that make me look fat. I showed them the much more recent picture of me eating ramen:

This seemed to satisfy them. I filled out some paperwork, thanked them and left ecstatic, back on top. I hopped a shinkansen to Osaka.

This has been a pretty memorable trip.