This weekend was a blur of activities. I love sakura time so much. Before it started Japanese people were always telling me how great it was and so forth but it wasn’t until I actually saw it that I understood. This place is beautiful! Everywhere you walk you are surrounded by pink trees. They look like snow. But the great thing is that it is not snow which I hate. Although it did snow on Friday morning which impressed no one. Let’s see, what did I get up to this weekend? Well, lets start back on Thursday when I purchased a fantastic new oven! I can now cook a whole chicken! It is both a microwave and convection oven. So far we have melted a marshmallow beyond all recognition and blew up an egg. It has been a very productive time for us as you can tell. We also made carrot muffins which I love. Friday, Gisela and I met for a few celebratory weekend cocktails which turned into an all night affair. The next day I had to get up early to renew my car in Nagiso which is a damn long way away. It is about a two hour drive and I said I would be there around 10, not realizing what we would get up to the night before. This was an arduous trip for me. I got down there pretty easily though with the help of tea and snacks. There is practically no such thing as a drive through in this country though. You can’t just hit a coffee shop and be on your way. Everything is café style. At any rate, I got down there and had a nice chat with the lady at the company who I have been in contact with. She recommended that I go up to the azalea festival that was happening in the town that day. I had to go to another hanami party that afternoon but I decided to go to this anyways because I had been sitting in the car for a very long time. I am so glad I went because it was beautiful! The trees were all bright purple. It was in somewhat of a small area that formed a kind of amphitheatre in the side of the mountain. The view was incredible from up there. I walked through all the pathways and took loads of pictures. The cherry blossoms are all finished there because of a strong rain the day before but just like clockwork, these flowers all opened up the next day. It looks kind of strange because the ground is covered in pink petals and the trees are all fluffy and purple. It is like you are in Hello Kitty’s back yard or something. Children were eating ice cream and fried fish on skewers and all the old people were clamoring but the step hills to see the flowers. Seniors in this country are out climbing a mountain or riding a bike until their dying day I think. I always see these hunched old people working away in their gardens or sweeping the sidewalk. Their backs develop incredible hunches. Many old women are almost bent double. That is just not something you see all that often at home. I was talking about this with friends and they suggested it was because of years of working in the rice fields with short handled tools. All of the tools here seem to be half the size of back home. A shovel or a broom for example is not even as high as your waist so you must hunch over to use everything. Gisela gets physio on her foot at a centre where they try and correct these hunched peoples’ posture. They are essentially being stretched by a system of hooks and pullies. It is all a little medieval and can’t feel that good. A better solution might be long handled brooms and shovels.
After the azalea festival I got back in the car and drove up to Suwa. On the way I almost struck and killed a giant monkey that ran in front of my car. We are talking a big monkey! It was larger that a dog. It would have done serious damage to the car and obviously to the monkey. They guide behind me almost rear ended me too. The following distance is quite close here compared to the big roads of Canada. Anyway, I arrived in Suwa unscathed and enjoyed a lovely hill top picnic with friends from a community group we are all in. There was enough food to feed an army. It was all quite delicious to. Gisela and I were still feeling a little rough but managed to eat a ton anyways. Suwa has a big lake in the middle of the city and they have an number of tour boats shaped like various animals to tour the lake on. It is rumoured that Suwa and Okaya are Yakusa (mafia) retirement towns. I don't know if I believe this but they do pull bodies out of the lake occasionally. We went home in the late afternoon and chilled for a little while and then headed out to another cherry blossom party at Matsumoto castle. The petals are starting to fall there now. The party was almost entirely foreigners and it felt like a JET conference. I hadn’t seen many of those people in a long time so it was a load of fun. We met this group of Japanese missionaries that had been raised with English as their first language. This is incredible in a country like Japan. I have no idea where they would have gone to school. Probably some emersion type of place. You just never meet Japanese people who don’t speak Japanese as probably sounds obvious. That’s why it was so strange to meet these guys. They were cool though and they hung out with us for a while. After the bonsai we headed off to a club called SOS. They have a great DJ but it is not too loud to talk. After that we headed to a club called Sonic. A car load of us got back to my place around 4 on Sunday morning. Thanks to Louise for being the designated driver! We slept for a few hours and then headed back to Matsumoto after lunch for a little shopping and general missioning around. I was starting to feel quite tired by this point but the weather was so nice we just wanted to keep going. We got back home around 7 that night and then we made some dinner. The four of us Shiojiri people all gathered for a bit of a chat and then I eventually went to bed around 11. I don’t feel too worse for wear today although I couldn’t get up in time to ride my bike to school. It is an absolutely beautiful day out though and I will definitely go for a bike ride after work. Another post is following about something very bizarre that happened today at work but I won’t have time to take pictures of it until tonight. Stay tuned for further developments!