Sakura is in full swing in Nagano! The cherry blossoms are looking lovely, although the weather hasn’t been the best for viewing them. I have loads of hanami parties to attend with my students this week in Shiojiri and Matsumoto. We all eat and drink while sitting under the cherry trees on a typically blue tarp. I went to the sakura Mecca of our prefecture yesterday. It is a little town called Takato. There is supposed to be something like 1500 trees there. It is quite nice but to be honest a bit on the over-kill side. It’s hard to appreciate it when there is so much of it. There were hundreds of people there as well. They came from all over Japan to see it. We waited in traffic a long time. Unfortunately we had been out until about 5 the night before and were therefore drinking a lot of water to rehydrate ourselves. This meant we needed to pee in a pretty serious way as well. This led to the use of the most disgusting roadside toilet I have ever seen in my time in Japan. Shudder. It was fun just people watching. Check out this guy's sweater. Does he know what it says or not? He was there with his two young children. I thought it was so funny. Even if he can read it, does he know that it is highly offensive?

We ate some pink ice cream and wandered around for a while taking pictures. I tried to keep the pictures interesting because you got the feeling as you looked around that there were thousands of fairly crap portrait style photos being taking all around us. We were there in the late afternoon and the weather was quite warm. It was nice to get a little sun on my very pale skin.
Tom and I are in the midst of a giant project and proposal for the elementary schools in Shiojiri. We want as many of them as possible to take on the curriculum that we have designed together. That is taking up most of our working time these days. It is interesting to Tom and I but probably not to anyone else so I won’t go into the details of it all. I went back to elementary school this past week to begin the new school year. There are loads of cool looking new teachers at elementary school. It is so much cooler than junior high school. I don’t know why that is exactly but most people agree that this is true.
Thankfully, Easter arrived and thus, Lent ended. I gave up too much stuff this year and really wanted those things back. It has made for interesting conversations with my students though. We have been talking about if they would be able to give up their four favourite food and drink items for forty days. I love the cultural differences that come out when we talk about things like this. Some of their favourite things that would be really hard for them to give up were cucumbers, anko (sweet bean paste), cup ramen (noodles), coffee, chocolate, rice, fish, sashimi, and mayonnaise. Well, I had chocolate on my list but that’s about all we had in common. We all agreed that it would be nice to have a Lent that existed all the time for food we didn’t like. I would especially love to stop eating many things at school lunch for religious reasons! I don’t think that would fly here though. On Easter Monday, I had a bunch of people over for dinner. I made a pork roast that I got from the Brazilian butcher shop. I am so glad we have a Brazilian community in Shiojiri! I also made scalloped potatoes, various veg and apple crisp. I forgot until relatively late in the game that two of the people coming were vegetarian. I quickly made raw spring roll type things with tuna and avocado. It was a bit samushi (sad looking) though. What do vegetarians eat at Easter? If I had thought about it sooner, I would have gotten something better together. We have loads of choice in the tofu department and I also really like tofu here. It is a nice thing to eat now that I know various ways to prepare it. I never really ate it in Canada and there isn’t much variety in the grocery store. I think I viewed it as a staple food item for vegetarians and apart from that, not much use to the rest of us. Its good stuff though. I especially like it with spicy kimchi (Korean spicy cabbage preserve) or with sesame dressing. I am so glad I am not vegetarian though. I don’t eat a lot of meat and I don’t love commercial farming practices but I just can’t make that big of a life style change. I think the main reason for that is that it is a huge inconvenience for other people. I couldn’t ask people to change that much for my personal choice. It is kind of like high jacking other people with your own beliefs. Maybe that is putting it a little too strongly. I know it is a tool for social change in a lot of ways and it raises awareness for humain treatment of animals but I just couldn’t do it myself. I know not everyone is doing it for those reasons either but the people I know definitely are. Gisela, Reah, Erin, you are great people, keep it up! I don’t know how that turned into such a rant. I must have been thinking about it recently. Anyways, Easter dinner was fun and delicious and I got to have leftovers of pork and potato soup the next day. I also made dyed hard boiled eggs that looked really cool while cooking.
Also I got a new haircut! Everyone always worries about getting their hair thinned too much by Japanese stylists. I had it done to the max! and I love it! It is so light and spring like! The woman cutting my hair told me that Japanese people have very fat hair and the backs of their heads are generally flat. She thought I had hair like a baby. She spent some time just fluffing it up for fun. I didn’t mind, it was fun. I never looked so much like a girl before. Tom got his hair cut at the same time. The back of his hair wasn’t all that even though so he asked me to cut it off. He is very tall and wanted to stand over the sink. As a result, I accidentally stabbed him in the neck with the scissors. Sorry friend!

Nothing seems to be happening with that Lindsay Hawker case. I have been checking the papers and seems like nothing has happened with it. It makes the police here look seriously incompetent and uninterested in solving crimes involving foreigners. Speaking of which, Tom witnessed a large Sakura related fight at Sky Park yesterday. I thought this was crazy! Sakua is like the happiest time of the year for japanese people! We almost never see fights let alone in the middle of the day between two big groups of people. He doesn’t know what the fight was about but they carried on fighting for about an hour. Men and women alike were throwing themselves into the fray for an unbelievably long time until someone finally called the police. Despite the fact that it was a large group fight (how Japanese!) they sent only two officers. They soon realized this wasn’t enough and got about six more to come out. But once they were there, they were so unbelievably ineffective! They didn’t try to break up the fight at all. They just took peoples names down in a list and asked people to calm down. One of the officers stepped in front of one of the guys fighting and the guy apparently ripped his uniform. This would lead to a full scale police attack back home. Can you imagine attacking a police officer and then having them just stand there?! Insane. I had no idea that method of discipline continued outside of the elementary school setting. They were completely ineffectual. Tom said the whole thing was good entertainment value because you never see a thing like that and his sakura spirit was not even remotely dampened. That’s our man! This picture doesn't show the haircut very well and it is shockingly close to my head. I hate close up shots like that but you get the idea of what it looks like. This is the first time I have ever had remotely curly hair!