Enjoying Simple Pleasures

These days have been treating me well, perhaps to make up for the Nine Week Silence. I went with friends to a beautiful organic Japanese restaurant in Koide a few days ago. It was located in a gorgeous old fashioned Japanese building, complete with a pond and traditional garden. Inside, the ambiance was amazing in every detail, and they offered things like sakura scones and imported pastas and soya. The menu sounded so delicious cover to cover that deciding was an extremely painful experience. I ended up with a Tempeh Burger, and was not a mite disappointed.

Today, my cycling buddy messaged me shortly after class and we met with our bikes to face the ‘chance of rain’ forecast. It was perfect cycling weather, except for the unusually strong winds which actually pushed us around a lot! We went to the park and explored every corner. I bought some veggies at my favorite veggie vendor, after which the two of us sat out by the pond taking in the view. Luckily, she was up for fuwa-fuwa dome after a while, and we spent half an hour or so enjoying the bizarre trampoline and laughing like children. It was very refreshing. Check out the quality of this cell phone shot from the park!

After riding around the park for a bit, we caught a bite to eat for lunch at Budou no Hana and then headed back to campus. We took a totally new route neither of us had explored before, and found an enormous and beautiful old sakura tree, as well as a whole huge line of younger trees planted not 15 minutes from campus. They were all in bloom, and looked amazing against the still snow-capped mountains.

I think after today we have a pact to go to the park at least once a week. I’m looking forward to next time already.

A Day Without Shoes! (but with a bicycle)

April 8th is the Toms Shoes event – a day without shoes. This is an awareness raising campaign seeking to highlight the health problems caused for children in developing countries and poorer regions of the world, most of whom grow up without shoes. Learn more at their website: One Day Without Shoes.

I’m participating, although I didn’t get the rest of my act together ahead of time in order to drum up support on campus (there’s still next year!). It really snuck up on me. Anyways, we do still have snow on the ground, but today has been one of the clearest and therefore warmest days we have had in ages. It is fully 50 glorious degrees fahrenheit, and feels warmer with the sun filling up the cloudless sky.

To take advantage of this good fortune a friend and I took a bike ride. It was a little awkward riding without shoes at first (I threw some in my basket just in case), but I adjusted soon enough. We spent and hour and a half of the warmest part of the day basking in the gorgeous changing landscape around us, and exploring previously unknown roads that hug the curves of a nearby mountain. Here are some cell phone shots I took today:

And this last bit is where I walked through the puddles formed by melting snow. We couldn’t stop laughing at my footprints. It was a lot of fun.

Winter in Urasa (a photo post)

Many photos taken in Urasa and on campus over the past two weeks. Rumor has it that the snow is going to end early this year, sometime in February instead of March. I’m not entirely convinced, but only time will tell.

(a view from my dorm)

(the sidewalk, nearly transformed into a tunnel)

(Urasa with blue skies as seen from the soba stall in the station.  This is basically the entire town.)

(someone’s bike)

(the view from Urasa)

(those rare blue skies allowed these trees to shed their frosting)

(a view from the bridge, down to the river)

おしまい

An Extremely Overdue Update

So, as many of you gathered from twitter, fb, or some other futuristic time wasting machine social networking site, it snowed here just a couple weeks ago. Unfortunately, I was way too excited about it to grab any photos, really.  But here are some excited shots of friends and classmates (cool fact: some people here were seeing snow for the first time! Including some visiting Indonesian professors who were only in Japan for a couple of weeks). These four photos aren’t mine, they’re all from friends’ fb pages.

Here is what it looked like the next day around lunchtime.  We’ve enjoyed snowcapped mountains to a greater or lesser extent ever since.  And there are a few more rooftop shots on flickr - here.

In other news, I survived midterms and will live to tackle finals in only a few short weeks. I also finally got my hands on a fridge, which is in very questionable condition but keeps food sufficiently cold.  I would like to replace it as soon as I can though because for many reasons due to age, storage and the treatment of former owners, it is not an energy efficient appliance by any stretch of the imagination.

I have really been enjoying the fall weather, to some extent to the detriment to my productivity, but also to the great boon to my spirit.  One particularly lovely day I walked with a classmate through the dormant rice fields to the town’s charming park, nearby produce market, and local winery. The produce shop is called 「八人八色」or Hachinin Yairo, and you can purchase gorgeous seasonal locally grown vegetables for extremely good prices. Most of their vegetables are actually cheaper than at the grocery store.  Below are some photos from that uplifting excursion.

The park also has the strangest – slash – most interesting trampoline I’ve ever seen, which basically looks like a squishy, three peaked mountain range. There are usually at least a few children with their parents playing there, and once I even saw a mother stretching atop the center mound while her tiny child jumped on her back (presumably deepening the stretch? but he fell off and bounced along the other side). I haven’t tried this out yet, but it looks like loads of fun. I’m thinking some IUJ students need to go down to the park for a picnic in the winter. We can jump until we are no longer cold, then sit in the park and eat. Maybe this only sounds like a good idea to me though. Haha!