No Sleep 'Til Fukui: May 2006

Echizen Pottery

I love pottery! On Saturday we went to the pottery village's anual fair/festival. There were so many potter's there I couldn't believe my eyes. I bought a vase which is beuuuutiful and looks like something out of a Frank Lloyd Wright house.

Here's some of the stalls and pots/vases with gold fish in them.

Here's Rob by a sculpture in the park area. Who can really say what the sculpture is meant to be?? The nice part about the park is the green grass and trees. We have plenty of green things all over Japan, but very little of it is actually grass for sitting, picnicing, or running. Mostly it's just rice fields.

To complete the festival atmosphere there was a giant jumpy house for the kids and -get this- kids could don a helmet and take a ride in the electric company's cherry picker basket trucks. I was amazed.

Our Car Blew Up

not really, but I wish it had... About 6 weeks ago when we were in a minor traffic accident. It would have saved us a lot of time and headaches had it blew up at that point.

After 5 weeks of the insurance company being jerks and promising at least 5 times to call us back, and never once doing so we figured out or car is illegal to drive. Our dealer told us this when we went to take pictures for the insurance claim. That came as a huge shock to us. And all of a sudden (while it was pouring down rain) we had to come up with a car to drive. Thanks to our friends here we have been managing the past week without a car.

Yesterday we found a car we want to buy. It's a mitsubishi guppy. Today we filled out forms. So the car dealer will get our car registered in our name and get new license plates for us in the next several days. Then, we'll pay them the $2,000 and get to drive away with a car. I'm looking forward to having a car with features that work again!

Gardens

We went to Manyo Garden last weekend. Which seemed a bit lame at this particular season and sort of untaken care of. But there's lots of nice spots that were beautiful. It's only about 15 minutes drive from our apartment so it made a nice little adventure for the morning. I saw peonies for the first time!

My favorite part of the garden was this wooden area with streams and water running through all these edible looking plants, moss, and ferns.

This dragon fly's wings are clear! You can totally see the rock through them!

After seeing the gardens we went to the building where they grow the chrysanthemums. And we ate chrysanthemum (kiku in Japanese) soft serve ice cream. It was quite unremarkable if you are reading this and thinking of trying it sometime. This area of Takefu is actually well known because there are loads of greenhouses where they grow kiku for the amazing Takefu Chrysanthemum festival. (I didn't go last year, but here it is amazing.) They make huge people from various literary scenes using only chrysanthemums.

test time

I don't like test time in Jr. High School. My classes get canceled or are filled with boring review worksheets. All the teachers are frantic and running around the school for no obvious reason. Plus the kids can't come into the teacher's room.

This sounds like not that big of a deal to me as an American. I don't think I've ever seen the inside of a staff room, or know if there is one... But here teacher's don't have a desk in their homeroom class because it is really the kids homeroom class. The kids stay in that one room all day and the teachers come to them to teach. So all the teachers keep their paperwork and office/desk stuff in the teacher's room. Plus in Japan all the special rooms like the library, music room, art room, sciene lab, computer room are always locked if not in use. So when a kid needs to use that room they have to come to the office to get the key and unlock the door. Kids need to see their teachers for all manner of reasons... Some of which I think are turning in homework, getting a worskeet corrected, finding out what the class` homework is, or just chatting. So one a usual day there is loads of traffic around my desk which is right next to the door.

All of this makes life tricky as well as annoying to me. I have to try and distinguish what they are saying or which teacher they want to talk with from their mumbeled Japanese. Then I say that teacher's name so that they will come to the door. There's a few new teacher`s names that I don't know yet so I'm always hoping they won't need that teacher. Because that would be awkward. Not awkward enough for me to just learn their names, though.

more things and stuff

Upon walking out of the Tokyo Shinkansen terminal I was greeted by a Hello Kitty bus. I couldn't have been happier. Well if the bus were pink it would have been better.

This is Yokohama. It's a city by the bay. There is a Chinatown here. It's night time so you can see the neon lights and some Chinese characters. I guess it looks a lot like other parts of Japan, huh.... But you can walk around WHILE EATING huge steamed buns with meat or sesame (my favorite). We went here with our friend Tomo, who now lives about 30 minutes from Yokohama.

Boys day flags on the mast of a ship in Yokohama bay. It's a famous ship, but we didn't go inside because it was closed.

These are the emperor's beautiful azaleas. They are tiny. I didn't know there was a such thing as miniature azaleas, but apparently if you are the emperor of Japan you can have them.

We went to Ueno zoo. There were a lot of people so we didn't stay long. But we did stay LONG enough to take this picture.

I fell in love with bridges on this trip... maybe now I will be inspired to read about other bridges in Madison County or something. uhhh yeah so bridges in Tokyo are cool and multicolored and from many different architectural periods. We went under about 20 of them on the boat tour to Odaiba.

We can see a beautiful view from here.

I took this pic from our living room window. The water is a rice field, which are pretty common around these parts! Hooray for accurate stereotypes!

Tokyo yo!

We went to Tokyo for Golden Week. It was awesome. We will head back to Tokyo in June, so we will be able to go to some things we missed like the Tsukiji fish market.

Assorted electronics in Akihibara. Most of my students associate Akihibara with otaku while I think many westerners know it because of the electronics. There are these crazy alleys that have switches, resistors, and other stuff.