Forgotten Park Photos

Here are a couple pictures from the park that is near us that I wrote about previously.

"I thought I was coming up for some grub...not for a picture. You better at least post it on your blog!"
The cicadas in one portion of the park were deafening. I actually had to cover my ears.
You can see the bamboo forest in back of this 300 year old bonsai ("not banzai, BONSAI, Daniel-san")

Tanabata

Our city had a Tanabata Festival this past weekend. It celebrates the meeting of the lovers Vega and Altair. The Milky Way separates these lovers, and they are allowed to meet only once a year. The characters on the streamer reads "tanabata." The city was very pretty with all the large streamers, some of which had lights and mechanical components to make them move. People write wishes on paper and hang them on bamboo. I read one written by a child that said "It'd be great if I could become a dog."

I was amazed at how many dancers there were. The parade kept going and going and going. I think the whole city came out.

There were vendors selling all kinds of food. There were lots of items on a stick including: sausage, chicken, potatoes, scallops, mussel, chocolate covered bananas, cucumbers, eggplant, candied plum, and the above pictured squid. The popular item seemed to be a baked potato with loads of butter.

The kids had fun playing games. In this game the kids have a paper scooper (plastic handle and rim, of course) and get as many balls out of the water as they can until the paper breaks. There is also a version with goldfish.






I thought these sparrows were mechanical at first! Everyone was watching the dancers and I was looking in the opposite direction squealing over the baby bird. I couldn't stop watching. People might have assumed I was drunk.




Erik got a big kick out of this huge poster. Apparently this guy used to be famous...

Fire Insurance

Some of you have been asking me what I've been doing with my time since I'm currently not working. Other than the fun I had last week with vacation Bible school, I've been telling everyone that I've been doing move-related errands and random tasks. The following is an example of a "random task. " I spent a good deal of the morning translating our fire insurance paperwork. Luckily it had cute pictures to help out.

This poor guy needs accident insurance because his window is broken.

This guy is freaking out because his safe was broken into (good thing we don't have a vault in our home).

I hate when my luggage catches on fire at hotels. Now that I have this insurance I can, without worry, take my most flammable items with me on vacation.


This is obviously for structural damage.


I see two houses on fire so I suppose it covers me and my neighbors. It also covers bodily injury. It must be tiring holding his leg up like that.



Even though this guy feels so bad about breaking his neighbor's garbage bag shaped vase, they're still yelling at him. How rude! The second picture took me a while to figure out. The person is not injured nearly as badly as in the picture above (no head wrappings). And why is there someone bringing flowers? This insurance is for when someone gets hurt at your house. You are bringing flowers because you feel bad about it and because you still have money thanks to your insurance coverage.

Fun, eh?

Mini Olympics

I have been excited about the Olympics coming all summer. Our household goods (including our tv) have not arrived, but we haven't let that stop us from cheering on team USA. This is how we've been "enjoying" the Olympics. Our screen would be a 60" to Thumbelina.

Park

Since we don't have our own cute kids to post pictures of, we took a few of some random Japanese kids (we actually took a bunch, but are only posting a couple). The slide was a lot of fun. We didn't try out the white bouncy thing, but several Japanese adults did.

Sunflowers

We visited a park not far from us and found a huge sunflower field with several different colors of sunflowers. The picture with the large tree gives an idea of how big the field was. The pictures look a little darker on the slide show and I don't know how to remedy it. If you click a picture you can enlarge it. BTW, I do realize that the pink flower is not a sunflower! Erik made some great tasting honey...what a cute worker bee.

Money Bags

We forgot to post this picture earlier. This money came from the bank, not a monopoly game. To get our mansion we had to pay: one month's rent (200,000 yen), deposit (200,000 yen), key money (one-time fee that everyone pays when renting a place in Japan: 200, 000 yen), agent fee (200,000 yen), and fire insurance (10,ooo yen). I don't know why we look so happy to be paying this much money. Anyway, we heard that it is much worse in Korea. A friend told us that he had to carry a suitcase full of money, 3 years worth of rent paid up front, to get his place. What we had to carry was mere chump change in comparison...

New Mansion

We just moved into our new "mansion," which is what apartments are called here. We're on the top floor of a five floor building. We have 3 bedrooms, one tatami (bamboo mat) room, kitchen, living room, and 1 bathroom. Since we're on the top floor we have a large wrap around balcony. On the floor plan you can see how big it is.

There is a train line running right by our apartm...,I mean mansion, building. We are on the opposite side of the building from the train line and don't hear it from in the house at all. Erik and I have a 5 minute walk to one of 2 train stations.

This one is called Fussa Station. You can see all the taxis, the KFC, and the Golden Arches Steakhouse (what my parents called McDonald's when I was little- so I wouldn't know). Larger train stations have restaurants, book stores, and boxed lunch places. Seiyu, on the right, is a large department/grocery store with I think 4 floors. It is owned by Walmart. The food items in there have the familiar "great value" Walmart brand logo. We probably won't shop there too much!

As you like it pancakes

We went out to eat with Erik’s coworkers who are also new to Yokota. We went to an okonomiyaki restaurant. I’ve seen it translated “as you like pancakes.” Basically you get a bowl of batter (not sweet) and a bunch of chopped cabbage. You choose the rest of the toppings from all kinds of meat, seafood, and veggies. At the table you mix it up and grill it. It was fun, especially since some of the directions were a mystery to us. One of our orders had mochi (pounded rice), which is ooey gooey when melted, and cheese. The rest were pork, bacon, and beef. We even ordered a dessert that required the same process of mixing and frying. Yum, yum, yum! It’s funny to go out to eat to avoid cooking and end up at a restaurant where you….cook. Well we didn’t have to prepare or do dishes and, of course it was fun. The tables beside us produced perfectly round and browned pancakes. We realized that we’ll have to return again to hone our cooking skills. Darn!

Marie and Tokio

Erik’s sister Marie and her husband came to see us on base. Tokio was AMAZED and excited to be in the U.S. For sightseeing, we went to the commissary and exchange and looked at all the American foods and products. We had Pizza Hut for lunch. Tokio said that next time he wants to bring a friend who’s never been outside of Japan to visit the U.S. by coming to the base. This amused Erik and I since the base is pretty small and ALL of the buildings are brown and tan.

Packaging

Everything in Japan is packaged nicely. Most items are individually packaged. When you go to a bakery, each bread item will get it’s own plastic bag and then all of those items are put into a bag. We recently went to a cookie shop and took some pictures of us unwrapping our goodies. First you have to take items from the plastic bag.

Then the cold item and cookies were separated into their own brown bags.

Inside the brown bag, each item was wrapped in a plastic bag. Notice each cookie has its own desiccant. Wow, that’s a lot of work if you’re really hungry!

Mt. Takao

It took us over an hour of fast paced climbing to get up Takao mountain. The mountain is 599 meters high (for those baffled by the system the rest of the world uses, that’s about 2000 ft). It was a beautiful hike as you can see by the pictures. After getting to what we thought was the top of the mountain we saw these stairs. It turns a corner and keeps going! The tiny white speck is a hiker.

If you notice in the pictures, I was not prepared for the hike. The Japanese hikers had appropriate gear including boots, walking sticks, backpacks, and headbands (I guess sweatbands). I had on my church dress and heeled sandals and had my plastic umbrella in hand. A girl’s gotta always look her best. Anyway, we had a great day and a great end to the day, i.e. a great dinner. The Japanese have a type of restaurant that is similar to Spanish tapas. You order several small dishes and share. It’s a good way to try different items. The chicken on a stick, yakitori, was very tasty. We should have taken pictures of the dishes; I’ll spare you a full description.

This is one of the views from the top of the mountain. It was too overcast to see Mt. Fuji. The mountain had many very old, large trees. They were impressive. Below is a statue of a tengu. I can’t remember exactly what they are (that’s what wikipedia is for if you’re interestedJ), but they were all over the mountain temple area.