Headed out yesterday (April 30) planning to go west on Shichijo, over the river and to loop around Katsura Villa to Katsura-eki.
The trip down Shichijo was far longer and less pleasant than expected, and I lost half an hour walking up a channel adjacent to Katsuragawa which I'd mistaken for a the real thing before hitting a dead end. After an unnecessarily wide loop down I went south along the east bank imagining that I'd eventually hit a pedestrian bridge, significantly misjudging my relation to the Villa, and unaware that I was heading down a narrow spit with no bridges along either side. It was just after rounding the tip and being startled by a snake basking on the canal ridge ahead of me that I turned back to trace my path. A middle-aged woman walking a bicycle passed me, and it was only watching her disappear around the corner that had my conscience take leash and I chased her down to offer a presumably incomprehensible warning.
Despite all that the river itself was nice, and unlike the Kamogawa it's clearly a place for play. People were fishing, bug-catching, jogging and cycling and playing tennis on old courts. Over a rise kids were participating in a soccer meet and towards the Hachijo-dori bridge were tens of children in baseball uniforms with mums sitting by strollers on a large tarp next to the long row of bikes.
Eventually I took a convoluted path south through Katsura and over the JR tracks, getting to Katsuragawa-eki from the opposite side (rather than the far closer Hankyu Katsura station) and returned to Kyoto the saner way, having taken about 4.5 hours and gotten nicely sunburned.
I wasted time in the building's common area until 11:25 hoping to manufacture a run-in with the impossibly cute Canadian-Japanese girl whose dinner invitation I'd crazily passed up the night before. When I went to the cafe to drink away my sorrows and related that saga to workmates I was told she'd been in the bar and left 10 minutes before I'd arrived (and was flying home to Quebec the next day).
