Kimono

This past Saturday, Adam had to work in the morning.  The students wanting to come to Calgary in January had their English interviews.  Since we only had the afternoon to ourselves, we headed over to Nangu Shrine here in Tarui and did the hike up the mountain.  Tarui is just full of surprises.  This shrine was beautiful, it even had a path of Torii gates (we didn't even need to go to Fushimi-Inari in Kyoto :P), and the hike was great.  It seems like hikes in Japan are just straight up and straight down.  It took us about 40-50 minutes to get to the top and once again we were rewarded with a spectacular view.  I thought that we'd be able to see more leaves changing colour since you can see from a distance the differing shades on the mountains now.  On the path though, it was still mostly green.

A flowering tree

Top of the mountain

Nangu Shrine

On Sunday, a lady invited me over to her house so that I could put on a kimono.  She dressed me up in her kimonos.  The one from her single days has long sleeves, and the one that she uses now that she's married has shorter sleeves.  I broke the married/unmarried kimono rules and put on both.  They were both so beautiful.  They're made of real silk so they're very expensive.  I really enjoyed the experience.  I had heard that it takes a long time to get dressed in a kimono.  It really didn't take that long, but that being said it did take longer than putting on my wedding dress.  Maybe I was just expecting it to take longer.  She served Adam and I tea, ginger ale, and doughnuts.  She's one of the students in our adult English class, so she can speak English.  

Kimono for unmarried women

Kimono for married women

This week, I have become a cook extraordinaire!  I made lotus root chips this past Thursday and Saturday which taste kind of like potato chips except they're both crispy and chewy.  I made a coconut milk curry sauce with chicken on rice on Tuesday.  This morning, I made sushi for breakfast (with left over cooked fish, not raw fish).  Today, I made homemade pitas for the falafel that I am currently making.  Looks, like my new hobby is cooking.  I'm having fun finding different things at the market and then finding something to make with them.  I think this is also the result of me being a housewife.  :)

Taruipia and Kyoto

November 6, 2014

                Taruipia festival was this past weekend and Adam had a booth at it to promote the Calgary homestay trip.  In January, Adam will be taking a group of junior high school students to Calgary to experience Canadian culture and do some touring around.  I went with him to the festival on Saturday.  Unfortunately, it rained the whole day so the park was turned into a giant mud puddle and not very many people came.  We set up a fishing for maple leafs game and drawing the northern lights activity.  The junior high school students who had gone to Canada last year helped out at the booth and ran the activities.  They had done most of the preparations by making posters about their experience in Canada and setting up the booth.  They were very helpful since they could explain to the kids what the activities were. 

                The festival had a stage set up with entertainment going on all day.  On Saturday, it was mostly dance with these other cartoon characters battling it out.  I was surprised at how many hip hop dances were performed, but I guess it’s pretty popular in Japan.  Our booth was well located as we could see the stage from our vantage point.  So this festival was a bunch of different booths, food, and entertainment.  At the end of the festival, they usually throw “mochi” into the crowd.  Mochi, we were told, is a sweet rice cake.  As the ground was a giant mud puddle the mochi was handed out in bags to people.  Adam and I lined up and got the mochi.  After supper that evening, we were both so excited to taste it.  Adam took a bite and a look of disappointment came across his face.  He offered some to me.  It wasn’t sweet at all, it seemed to just be rice puréed and put into these cute little circular cakes.  Adam brought the mochi back to the festival the next day and offered it to one of the English teachers.  She likes it and informed him that you don’t eat it plain.  You mix sugar and soy sauce together and dip the cake into that.  So far, I’ve found that Japanese sweets have excellent presentation, but I haven’t liked the taste. 

The Cartoon Characters on Stage

The Mud Puddle

Northern Lights with pastels.
It's actually harder to do than it looks.

The  leaves are starting to change colour.

                Sunday, Adam had to be at the festival the whole day again.  Meanwhile, I was invited to a Halloween party that one of my adult students was having for her students (she has a private English school in her home).  It was a pretty low key affair.  I introduced myself to the students and talked to them a little about Canada and then we played different games. 

                Monday was a national holiday for cultural day.  Adam and I decided to go to Kyoto.  It takes about an hour and a half to get to Kyoto by the slow train and one hour if you take the bullet train.  We opted for the slower train.  As it was a national holiday, the train and Kyoto were very busy.  Travelling in Europe, I always was able to sit on the trains I took between cities.  In Japan, lots of the time we have to stand or if we sit the seats aren’t together.  Luckily, we got seats.

Kyoto was the capital of Japan for 10 centuries and so there is a lot of culture, temples, and shrines.  Japanese people go to Kyoto and dress up in Kimonos and walk around getting their picture taken.  It’s great for tourists to see this traditional attire too.  I can’t understand how they can walk in the shoes though, they’re basically wooden flip flops. 

These two ladies even had their faces painted and wigs.

                We started off our day at the Fushimi Inari-taisya Shrine.  It’s a Shinto shrine with thousands of Torii gates going up the mountain.  These gates are really expensive and different people buy them and then their name is written on it.  We did the 4 km hike up and around the mountain through the Torii gates and had our lunch overlooking Kyoto. 

                After lunch, we headed off to the neighbouring temple of Tofukuji.  This temple is Buddhist and has the largest and oldest gate and meditation hall in Japan.  We looked at the things outside, but decided not to pay to go in.

The Gate

                Next was Kiyomizudera Temple.  On our walk there we passed many other smaller temples/shrines, but we opted to just go to the most famous ones since Kyoto is covered with temples and shrines.  We decided to pay to go into Kiyomizudera Temple.  The gardens of this temple were pretty big.  In future, I’ll want to try and research these places before we go since there aren’t too many signs and I read more after that explained all there is to see at the temple and what it means.  This temple was super crowded. 

                We then walked down Sannen-zaka and Ninen-zaka which are supposed to be preserved streets of Kyoto which show the old architecture.  Once again, it was incredibly crowded and reminded me a little of Banff or Jasper in the summer.  It’s basically a bunch of little shops selling souvenirs and food. 

                Our fourth temple of the day was Kodaiji Temple.  We just looked from the outside again and saw this giant Buddha.  I talked to the ladies at work about seeing this in Kyoto and neither of them had heard of it.  I don’t think it’s as famous, but it was pretty cool to just round a corner and see this giant Buddha. 

                The last temple we stopped by was Kodaiji Temple.  I’m just realizing now that we didn’t see the other really famous temple we were close to and that I thought we saw, that’s just how many temples there are. 

Our last stop was Maruyama Park.  We had our supper here as the sun set on this beautiful park.  Two models dressed in kimonos came and started to have a photo shoot right by where we were sitting. (At least it seemed like a photo shoot with 5 photographers each and them slightly altering their pose as their picture was being taken.)  Adam and decided to have our own photo shoot in this romantic garden after we finished our supper.

                We had walked all day and so wanted to take a bus back to the train station.  We boarded one, but it was so packed full that we had to stand and then it was rush hour so we decided that we could walk faster.  We got off the bus (still stuck in traffic) and walked. Needless to say, we got our fair share of exercise.

                On Tuesday night, we had our first adult English class.  Adam and I have ten sessions with this class.  The first one was just introductions, but I found it really fun.  My highlight of the night was speaking to one of the students in French.  J

One Day in the Life of a Shufu

                Well, if you haven’t figured it out by now, I am largely a shufu here in Japan (AKA a housewife).  This job allows me quite a bit of time for reflection as I do the laundry, the ironing, the cleaning, the cooking, etc.  I have time to reflect on how to serve and do the small things with great love as Saint Thérèse talks about.  That’s easier said than done.  How often do I feel like I’m not doing enough!  I’m busy all day and yet feel unaccomplished, as if having fresh home cooked meals, a clean home, and clean clothes has no merit.  Yet, I realize that I could be sitting in an office, doing very little, getting paid, and feel much more accomplished- simply because of the money factor.
 

This led me to reflect back on my experience at Madonna House in Combermere, Ontario.  Adam and I spent a week at Madonna House around New Years last year.  It was an extremely hard week for me.  I was in laundry the whole week, which allowed me time to reflect.  I folded people’s clothes with great care.  I ironed the linens used for the Mass with a perfectionism that I normally wouldn’t have used.  I had feelings of: “How and why does doing everything so painstakingly well matter?  No one will notice.”  The woman in charge of laundry talked about how people feel loved when they receive their clothes back, clean and neatly folded.  If we treat what belongs to them with love, they will feel loved.  While I was there, I fought with my desire to be praised for what I was doing because I wasn’t getting paid for it. I desired to be praised for doing a good job, praised for spending my holidays doing humble work for others. Yet, why should I be praised?  I was welcomed into their home, given a bed to sleep in and as much delicious and healthy food as I could eat.  I was taught to truly do my best on the small things out of love for Jesus and other people.  I’m still learning that lesson.  I still don’t see the value in doing the laundry with great love because it fails to produce an income. 

In prayer, I am always asking God what He wants from me in my life.  My focus in asking is always to know what He wants me to do in terms of a career choice (a way to make money).  I still haven’t gotten an answer.  All that I’ve gotten is the need to be present now, the need to seek His will now in the everyday things, the need to rejoice in the gift of life.  This is what my spiritual directors have told me too: focus on what is before you now, not on the “what may or may not happen five years from now”.  This means asking myself, “Is there someone in my life that I do not love as I should?  What are the small steps I can take to show that person love, to heal that relationship?”  Now that I have entered into my vocation of married life (which really is a much bigger deal than any career will ever be), I need to learn to be a good wife, I need to learn to love. 

This past weekend, Father told us a story about four religious sisters who gave up their life jackets to other people on a boat that was sinking.  They ended up dying as they gave their life for others.  He talked about all the little choices of love made every day that led to that final choice.  I’ve heard this same message in regards to St. Maximilian Kolbe and other saints before, yet every time I hear this message it really hits me.  I continually forget to look for the little ways to love when only looking for the “grand and glorious” acts of love or only looking for career paths.  The thing is I’ll never do great things with love if I don’t do the little things with love.  If I can’t see how to love in the little ways now, then any career that I have will be empty and meaningless.   Money is important, I know.  Yet, learning to love is everyone’s vocation, everyone’s path to fulfillment, and everyone’s salvation.  Money is dust.  Love is God.  That is how I should prioritize.

Welcome Party and More

October 29, 2014

                This past Friday, one of the schools that Adam works at threw him a welcome party.  It was conveniently located at a restaurant close to the Ogaki train station.  The food was really good.  We started off with three very little bowls filled respectively with spinach, octopus, and fish.  After this appetizer, they started the gas burner in the middle of the table with a wok filled with soup.  The soup had tofu, leaks, salmon (with the skin still on), other lettuce thing, and mushrooms.  They brought out a platter of sashimi (raw seafood).  Surprisingly, the thing that I liked the best out of the sashimi was the raw octopus.  I ate a piece of salmon and tuna, but it was tough getting that down.  They had different tempuras, salad, udon noodles, and ice cream puffs for dessert (I may be missing some things).  It was really good.  How it works is that they just have big dishes that everyone shares.  The school staff was so good to us.  Most of them know a little English and we had the English teachers there to help translate.  Everyone mingled from table to table, so everyone took a turn talking to us.  If they started talking in Japanese, someone would jump in and translate for us.  We felt very welcomed.

                On Saturday, we went to Ogaki again to shop and spent some time walking by the river.  This was the day where “people float down the river in a wash basin” as we were informed.  That’s really it.  They have one person with a long bamboo pole pushing and directing the wash basin down the river.  All the boats had traditional Japanese music playing in them too.  We had fun walking along and waving to everyone coming by. 

                Finally, I am beautiful.  Or, at least, that’s what everyone keeps telling me.  In Canada, you don’t really go around telling people they’re beautiful.  But in Japan, maybe because of the language barrier, or culture, I keep hearing how beautiful I am.  Adam’s staff members tell him that his wife is beautiful.  People tell me directly.  When we get back to Canada, I’ll have such a wonderful self-esteem.  J I was also told that I look like a Japanese pop star.  Who knew?

                Today, Adam and I had the honour to judge the choral festival of the other junior high at which he works.  We took our job very seriously and were glad to do it as it meant that we got to sit on chairs, whereas the teachers and parents were standing (the school has 1000 students who took up the seats).  This time, every class sang a unique song, and only one song.  Again, it was very impressive.  As we both know very little about music and even less about Japanese music, we tried to make the difference between our scores small so that they didn’t influence the results too much.  Luckily, there were three other judges.  After it was done, the students all stood up and sang a song together.  

Halloween

October 22, 2014

                This past Saturday, we were invited to attend a Halloween party at a preschool in Tarui.  We were asked to dress up.  Adam decided to go as Super Bear (AKA Super Kuma) and I went as a princess (AKA a woman in a green dress). 

                We were picked up by the school bus and driven out to the preschool.  It actually was quite far so I was glad we had a ride.  When we arrived we were greeted by the head teacher (or at least the teacher in charge of the day).  All the kids and teachers were dressed up, but none of the parents were.  I’m pretty sure Adam should have won a prize for the best adult costume.  Maybe even the best costume.  We had a few minutes before the activities began and in that time Adam had all these little preschoolers around him poking at him and feeling his costume.  They are told to sit down which actually involves them squatting.  Adam and I are given seats of honour (hot pink chairs) in front.  No one else has chairs except the head teacher.  All the kids around us are more interested in Adam than all the activities that are going on.  

              

Can you spot the hot pink chairs?

             Adam is first introduced and then interviewed by the Kita Junior High students who are volunteering as helpers for the day.  After some songs, a magic show, some stories (all of this done in English and fairly impressively), came the main highlight: Adam demonstrating how to carve a pumpkin.  The pumpkins that normally grow in Japan are little green ones (I had bought one earlier in the week to make a pumpkin loaf for our company Saturday night) so part of the cultural learning for the children was to see a large orange pumpkin and how to carve it.  I guess every year this preschool grows orange pumpkins for their party, but it’s hard to grow them because the summers are so hot.  From what I gathered, this year their crop didn’t do so well, so some farmers donated theirs.  Nonetheless, a couple of these pumpkins were huge! 

                Back to the main highlight, after Adam had asked what shape to make the eyes, nose, mouth, and drawn them on the pumpkin, he offered the knife to the junior high students.  All of them backed away.  So there’s Adam with a huge mincing knife carving this pumpkin.  The preschoolers are very interested, they’re all standing now peering over each other to get a look at the carving action.  The junior high students do step in and help take out the insides of the pumpkin while Adam explains how you can cook and eat the seeds.  I thought it was funny that the students had a plastic glove on to take out the insides of the pumpkin.  At last, the pumpkin was carved and the kids sang a song as Adam showed off his handy work. 

                After the main highlight, the children had the option to make a pumpkin craft with seeds, carve a pumpkin, or make pumpkin chiffon cakes (all of this with their parents of course).  During this time we wandered around checking it all out.  We ran into the English speaking family that we know here and chatted with them, admiring the children’s costumes. 

                As the activity time was coming to a close, the kids were arranged into partners to go trick or treating to fourteen haunted houses  These kids held hands with their partner the entire time (or at least it seemed so) which often resulted in one kid running ahead and pulling his/her partner behind to the next haunted house.  As you can see from the pictures, they’re really impressive and from the sounds of things they make them new every year.  That’s a lot of hard work!  Now, I’m getting ahead of myself.  So Super Kuma and Princess Janelle were also given trick or treating bags.  They gave us a map with the fourteen haunted houses on it and each time we visited a house they stamped that house on our map (this is multi-purposed as it helps kids see which ones they've missed and also make sure they don’t keep going back to the same house).  We both got bag fulls of candy and felt like little kids again.  Once the trick or treating was wrapping up, we were escorted to our table for lunch.  We were served a delicious lunch!  The party was over after lunch.  We were given a huge fruit basket and Belgian chocolates as a thank you for coming/ nice to meet you.  We also got to take the pumpkin that Adam carved home. I’d say that we got a lot of food just for demonstrating how to carve a pumpkin. 

Trick-or-treating
I think I look a little old for this :)

We were given a very warm send off as we were accompanied to the school bus/van.  The teachers and junior high students stood around the van and waived for quite a while as we drove off into the midday sun.  We really were given the royal treatment.  It will be strange going back to Calgary and losing our “celebrity” status.  It was a really enjoyable day and really great seeing all these cute kids dressed up for Halloween. 

                In conclusion, it seems like the Japanese, while not celebrating Halloween like we do in Canada, make a bigger deal out of it than us.  Lately, all my classes at the American Language School involves some Halloween activities.  

                That evening, we had one of the girls that I work with over for dinner.  It was an enjoyable evening filled with good food and Scrabble.

                With the new influx of pumpkin in our home, I have been making pumpkin loaves this week.  My plan is to give them to different people as gifts.

                Sunday, there was a Brazillian BBQ at church that we attended.  The food was really good, although there was only one kind of barbecued meat (they also had noodles, rice, a curry-potato dish, and salads).  That being said we both ate a week’s worth of meat.  

                Today was the Kita Junior High choral festival.  It was at the cultural centre and open to everyone.  Adam and I went together.  Every home room class in the school is its own choir.  They compete against all the other classes in this festival.  Each class first sings the same song (ie. the seventh graders all sing the same first song, the eighth graders a different same song, etc.) and then a different song.  They have (a) student(s) from their class playing the piano.  They also have a fellow student conduct them.  Boy, do those kids get into the conducting too.  The entire ceremony was led by the students, with them speaking before they performed.  The students were very well behaved and respectful as the other classes performed.  They do harmonies and different parts and everything.  They all sound very good!  I guess the most impressive thing to me, is that all the students participate, it’s not just those who are more musically inclined.  I had to leave before the end to go to work, but I guess after I left the entire school sang a song together and then the awards of first, second, and third place were given.