When Sven went back home a week ago, my sister Ulrika came to replace him. Well, replace isn't the right word, but anyway she became my new travelling companion. We stayed in a small ryokan in Nara, a little old town that was the capital of Japan before Kyoto and Tokyo. It's 1200 years since it was the capital, but there are lot of impressive buildings and monuments left from those days. I can't help but think what we were doing in Sweden 1200 years ago (Viking era), and how much is left from those days (not much, really).

We made day trips to Kyoto, Hiroshima and Osaka and stayed in Nara a few days as well. I was really happy that we stayed in Nara because it's much less touristy than Kyoto, much less noisy than Osaka, and pretty close to both those places. It's got a cute little old town which is pretty much impossible to navigate. The first night we spent a long time looking for a restaurant, finally found a place, and then as it usually goes walked past an area with lots of restaurants. Ulrika and I then tried very hard to find this area again and it took us a few days to do that. Our hotel was also in the old town and our way of finding it at night was to turn left from the arcade shopping street at the "Benko" store and keep going as straight as possible through the narrow streets. Getting lost in Nara-machi wasn't bad though, there are lot of fun little shops.

We found three favourite restaurants in Nara and kept going back to them. I guess we could have found other cool places but maybe it's not so bad to be happy with what you've got sometimes. We had breakfast at Café Rococo, a cool place that played slow Brazilian rhythms and had the best egg and ham sandwiches I've ever had. We had dinner at Ichizoku, a Japanese fast food place where time seemed to stand still and which did excellent set menus at less than 1000 yen. We quickly nicknamed it "Sigbritt's" because it smelled of wood, smoke and lamp oil like at our aunt Sigbritt's. It wasn't a place to find beautiful people, but hey, who cares about them anyway. Our third favourite was a tiny restaurant that I'm not sure I could find again (thanks sis for finding it last Sat!). There was an L-shaped bar with room for seven and that was pretty much it. The kitchen was behind the bar and the girl who owned the place cooked all the food in front of us and chatted to the customers while cooking. We loved this place and nicknamed it "Lilla tjejen" (little girl) because when we sat at the bar, our heads were about level with the chef's. It was only at the end of our second night there that she told us that she'd built place with a lower floor behind the bar so that it would be easier to chat with the customers. So she wasn't as little as we'd thought. We spent two great nights in this place, chatting to the other customers using the chef as an interpreter.

There's a new photo album "Around Nara" with photos from last week.

Now I am back in Shishikui to get some more surfing lessons. More about that and some beach and surfing photos next time!