Oofda. Time continues to fly by! It feels especially fast since we know we will be coming home so soon (under 6 weeks!!). So we made sure to do lots of cool things this month.
Tottori is famous for its pears or nashi. Specifically the 20th Century Nashi. It's only available in stores from August - Octoberish so I was very sad that I might never get to taste nashi ever again! Thankfully our friends told us about the Nashi Museum in Kurayoshi and that they have samples of nashi year round!
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| These are not your average Bartlett pears! |
The museum is circular and looks kind of like a giant nashi from the outside. Inside smack dab in the middle is a giant tree! The part enclosed in glass is the root system! It's taller than the tree!
Our next adventure was our trip to the Tottori Hanakairo Flower Park with Ellen. It was huge! With a giant glass dome in the middle. You also get a great view of Mt. Daisen!
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| Breathtaking! |
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| Too much to fit into just one picture! |
Our next big event was a two-fer. Ian ended up double booked one Saturday. His school was having their annual sports day festival and he was also scheduled to do a reading at the local library. So we did both! The sports day was pretty cool - all the girls did a choreographed dance and the boys did some daring acrobatics (ie. human pyramids). They also had a class by class giant jump rope contest (the winning team had over 80 consecutive jumps)!
Then it was off to the library. And of course the local TV station sent a camera man to capture the event.
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| Ian Sensei = local celeb |
We also had a super fun night with our friend Ellen, the cattle baron (let's call him CB), and some of his workers. We met up at a small smokey yaki niku place in town and ate, and drank, and drank, and drank! At one point Christmas Cakes and candles appeared out of thin air (apparently to celebrate a birthday and our upcoming 1 year anniversary)! When we called CB out on the fact that they were christmas cakes in May he said "shhhh! no one else can read the box!" this despite the fact that the decorations were clearly holiday themed! But I guess we can't judge too harshly since we still have our mini Christmas tree out on display!
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| Christmas cakes! |
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| Ian's new BFF |
I just have to share an incident that happened this morning. One of the trickiest things for us about life in Japan has been figuring out their garbage/recycling protocol! We felt like we had it pretty much figured out until just recently. We got a note slipped in our mailbox (all in Japanese of course) the gist of it was that someone in the neighborhood is putting out the wrong things on garbage day. We figured they probably meant us but couldn't figure out what in the world we were doing wrong - and why it is just now an issue since we haven't changed anything! Fast forward a couple weeks to this morning. I go out to the garbage drop site down the street carrying two bags - one with our general garbage and another smaller bag with our プラ (pura or plastic items). As I drop them off an old man (who I'm pretty sure was waiting to catch the garbage fiend!) intercepts me and explains that what we've been doing wrong is separating the plastics! We were doing too much work! The encounter left me 1 part embarrassed that we've been doing it wrong for so long and 1 part a bit proud since old man Japanese is notoriously difficult to understand, but I completely understood him and was even able to ask clarifying questions to make sure we don't make any more mistakes!
Well that's all for May and as it turns out June is almost over! Yikes!!
-Kari
