Well, the spring cherry blossoms are in full bloom - these past few days have been perfect for cherry blossom viewing and picture taking. Here are a few I took over the last few days:
The first four pictures were taken at Hachimanyama Park which has over 700 cherry trees and a big ugly tower in the middle of it. Here's a nice old cluster of blossoms:
Near the park's entrance is this beautiful old cherry tree that is helped along with a lattice framework and some support structures:
And here is our young Australian adventurer, Scott, climbing up to the blossoms. Michel and I have both commented on the fact that Scott has a way of walking into our photos (you'll see evidence of this again, further down):
This is a buddha statue to remember babies - from what I understand, it is a way to commemorate babies who were stillborn, died in infancy, or were aborted:
These next four pictures were taken at the Futaarayama Shrine in the center of town:
As you can see, this shrine - built about 1,600 years ago is a great way to escape the rather dull, Sovietesque architecture that makes up most of the city (you can see a bit of it peaking out from behind the entrance). For a great book on some of the more frightening aspects of Japanese modern culture and what is happening to the environment, read Alex Kerr's "Dogs and Demons: The Fall of Modern Japan."
Ah, there's Scott wandering into another photo. Scott loves cherry blossoms almost as much as he loves tequila:
Here's a close up of a blossom. This little flower transforms people around here - everyone goes out to the parks for hanami parties (cherry blossom viewing parties) and have large picnics and drink tons of sake and shochu:
Yesterday I finally found St. John's Anglican Church which I'd been looking for ever since I'd arrived. Well, it happens to be about three minutes away from my apartment by bicycle. I decided to attend church there this morning for Palm Sunday. The church is made from oya stone which is mined right here in little Ustunomiya. The inside of the church was really nice - a lot like many English Anglican churches I'd seen in Britain. This is the first church service I'd ever been to in my life where I had to remove my shoes before entering, but as that's a fairly normal thing to do whenever you enter many places in Japan, I wasn't surprised. The service was pretty much like the other Anglican/Episcopal services I'd been to except I couldn't understand the language. Because I have learned hiragana fairly well I can sing along with the hymns, but am a bit slow so I don't sing very loudly. Also, unless I recognize the hymn tune, I don't really know what I'm singing until I get to the "Amen" at the end which is in katakana, which I can't read, but which I can understand because katakana is used for foreign words in the Japanese language. I'll go back next week for Easter services. One of the ladies in the church spoke English fairly well (I should say amazingly well as my Japanese is crap) and told me that the other rector would be there next week and that he spoke English really well and had glob-trotted quite a bit. Here's the church:
After a stop home to change, I hopped on my bike and headed down to the JR train station where the buses also leave from. I grabbed a bus to the Utsunomiya Municipal Park of Nature and Arts - about a twenty minute bus ride. This turned out to be a great little outing for me as I got to see more grass and trees than I'd seen since I'd arrived. Here's a picture of a small pond on the museum grounds:
The exhibit was a retrospective of a Japanese artist called Yasutomo Watanabe - really great stuff. The main collection was good as well and I was happy to see some Chagall and this Magritte:
Here are some of the beautiful trees that I walked through and I wanted to take a picture of the beware of snakes signs I saw everywhere, but there were always people around and I felt stupid. I can't read the signs themselves, but they have this cartoon snake with eyes that look like 50s style cat glasses - like maybe they had "The Far Side" cartoon in mind when they drew this image. Anyway, here are the beautiful cedars and bamboo I walked through:
Here's a sepia tone version of the pond which came out great cuz the sun kinda haloed around the tops of the trees in a really cool way:
As I waited for the bus, I decided to get a little something to drink at the vending machine and I saw this can of grape jello. This seemed odd, but I had full faith in the Japanese - usually this sort of thing comes with a top that fully opens and a little spoon cleverly attached on the bottom of the cup. Well, I put in my coins and out came a pop can with grape jello in it. I opened it and put my mouth to it and nothing came out. So I began noisily slurping at it and thought how dumb I must look. I managed to slurp out about a third of the jello, when I decided to put my thumb over the opening and shake it until it was in small enough pieces to get through the opening. This worked, but man, what a silly concept:
Some of our lovely students. These three had a won! derful! time. This was supposed to be a candid, but one of them saw me with the camera and this was the result:
Here's one of my non-regular discussion class students, Keizo, with Takashi (my FocusPoint student), Masaki - an AEON student I've talked with but don't really know, Scott, and Toshiyuki (from my Encounter class):
Kentaro (ViewPoint Student) and Naoto with our assistant manager Yukiyo and Madoka, one of our full-time teachers.
I bopped around the tarp a bit to talk to a lot of people and ended up forcing my homemade rice pudding on this group (note: Many Japanese people are not used to having rice in a sweet context - except maybe mochi. Its probably as weird for them as it is for me to bite into a sweet here and have the filling be a sweet bean paste). Seiko (my FocusPoint student) and Sayaka (the head teacher) both bravely tried - and liked - my rice pudding. I'm not sure if Takashi or Masaki had any. I talked with this bunch about "24" and "Beverly Hills 90210" (Kentaro slyly snuck into the picture):
After we ate, Yoshi moderated our Bingo game where we gave out prizes to several winners.
Here's Keizo, Shizuka, and Michel:
Mayu, Masae, Emiko, and Scott enjoying themselves:
And here's me and Toshiyuki. Toshi runs a lumber import business up in my area of town and offers me green tea when I stop by to say hello.
After the bingo game, a pair of wandering Japanese cowboys stopped by with their mics, speaker, and guitar and sang for us and then invited us to go up - karaoke style - and join them in a song. Our young caballero Scott, opting for beer over tequila this time, bounded up and sang "Country Road" (This of course lead to Michel and I having get up and sing - Michel sang "Yesterday" and I sang "Twist and Shout." - see Michel's blog - probably - for video footage of the event):
Here's the gang as we wrapped up the party.
