Japan Week 12

(10/22) Thursday- Today was a very busy day getting ready for festivals! I made two posters, 1 about American Holdiays for our booth at the international foods festival, and 1 about Halloween for Eric's booth at his high-school festival. I have also been working on some fun Halloween projects for our friend Genny who is throwing her students a Halloween party. Thursday is also Tutoring with Toshiya, and tonight it included a haircut! Toshiya is a barber in our town, but I really wanted him to cut my hair because I figured I would be able to explain to him what I wanted done, his English is very very good! He was nervous to cut my hair because he usually only cuts thick, straight, short hair... and well, I have long, very thin, ultra curly hair. Regardless, he did a great job! We decided to take off about 4 inches!! I love it!

(10/23) Friday- Eric was scheduled to teach at another school today, but his visit was cancelled due to H1N1 flu. In Japan if any 2 students have H1N1 flu, the school is shut down for 1 week! The swine flu only reached Northern Japan about a month ago! Eric was a little bummed because he had planned a really cool lesson to help motivate the students to learn English, hopefully he will be able to go again soon. I spent the day baking, baking, baking. Tomorrow is the international foods festival and I am making all of the cornbread ahead of time so that I don't occupy an oven for 7 hours tomorrow while everyone is trying to cook! Tonight we will have our first overnight guest! Genny is coming over for a slumber party so we can work on projects for her Halloween party together!

(10/24) Saturday- The "slumber party" was great, we got a lot done! Today Eric had the Ajigasawa koko (highschool) festival, but it was only open for the students and teachers. At the end of the day they had a parade to show off everyone's halloween costumes, I didn't know about it in advance and I was busy cooking for the food festival so I missed it :( Eric wore a fantastic Elephant hat as his costume!! I arrived at the international festival at 1pm to begin cooking the bbq chicken and mashed potatoes. I had 2 excellent helpers!! 1 lady from our English conversation club named Yuko and another Japanese woman. They were extremely efficient, as soon as I asked them to do something they jumped and got it done faster that I could think about it! We got all 27 breasts of chicken prepared, cooked and shreded in no time, and the potatoes were a breeze too! The event was quite a success and it seemed like our food was very very popular! People paid cen yen (roughly $10) to get into the event and they were given one ticket for each booth so they were able to try foods from 8 different countries. This is what was served:

America: BBQ chicken, Mashed Potatoes, Corn Bread
France: Cabbage Soup
Korea: Mixed Rice Dish with a fried Egg on top
Canada: Fudge dessert! (delicious)
New Zealand: Pavlova (kind of like a Kiwi pie) also delicious!
Russia: Beef Stroganouf
Japan: Chanko-nabe (basically a giant soup pot with a lot of stuff in it)
United Kingdom: Flapjacks (kind of like cobbler without the fruit)

It was very interesting to try so many varieties of food all at one time! We also enjoyed a hula dancing show! I had no idea how strong international relations are between Hawaii and Japan! It was a VERY long day, but definitely a lot of fun!

(10/25) Sunday- Today the Aji ko festival was open to the public so I was able to enjoy it as well. Each club had an exhibit set up to show who they are and what they do. There also served a variety of typical Japanese foods and had veggetables for sale, and a yard sale. One club also set up a haunted house! The highlight of the event for me was the talent show! It was so interesting to see the students sing and dance. When i see them in the neighborhood they are all in uniform, very quiet and very proper; so to see them dressed up and singing and dancing was a lot of fun. I am sure it was even more surprising for Eric to see. The basketball team also made a movie, they did their own rendition of High School music, the movie was paused at times while they did a few live numbers, it was extremely entertaining, and rather impressive. I left the festival early because I needed to meet up with Yuki to head to an apple orchard. A few weeks ago I told him that I really wanted to experience working in an apple orchard and he mentioned that he knew someone with an orchard. He contacted them and told them that I would like to volunteer to help them with the harvest, so today we harvested many apples. They have a small family orchard here in Ajigasawa. Yuki and I went for the afternoon and helped them harvest. Their orchard is primarily Fuji Apples; however, they have 1 tree of yellow apples that are grown for export only. They have 22 trees and each tree has a few hundred apples on it! In the time I was there we harvested 4 trees, with 4 people. Needless to say, it was a lot of hard work! I really enjoyed it though. It was very neat to be working side by side with an elderly Japanese couple harvesting their crop! The husband kept setting off bottle rockets periodically because it scares away the monkeys. I never knew that monekys were afraid of fireworks! No wonder I like them!! He told me that if they would come and take 1 apple and leave he would let them come, but the problem is they come and pull down several apples and only take 1 bite out of them. He was pretty funny! He just had his 80th birthday and reminded me a little of my grandpa in the fact that he didn't seem a day over 50! He was up and down the ladders and running all over! Speaking of ladders, they were very impressed because I did not need to use a ladder to reach about 95% of the apples. In Japan they grow "short" apple trees, but the Japanese must use a ladder to harvest the top 50% of the trees. They were very happy to have me around today, in fact he took me to a few spots where he had me climb the ladder to reach apples he didn't think he would be able to get on his own. It was a very special experience for me and I truly enjoyed it! I also learned a lot about apples today, here are some of the things that I learned. It takes 5 months from the time the flower blooms until the apple is ready to be harvested. And;

When the apple first begins to grow a design is placed on the apple and then covered with a cheese cloth, this prevents the sun from hitting the apple in this spot. When the apple is fully grown the design can be seen. These apples are given on special occasions and sell for approximately 800 yen each. I was given a few in appreciation for my hard work :)

These apples are a light yellow color and a wrapped in a special paper bag that is lined with foil. This allows the apples to get enough warmth to grow without being exposed to the sunlight, which would turn them brown. These apples are not sold locally, they are exported to big cities in Southern Japan because people in our region typically cannot afford them. They are given as wedding presents, or for gifts when someone passes a driving test or a milestone birthday.

The apple on the left is a typical size apple found in Northern Japan, the apple on the right is the size of the apples that are exported to America! When I say we have big apples... I'm not kidding. These are Fuji apples, most people equate that to Mt. Fuji, which is incorrect. Fuji apples were cross-bred in a lab in Fujisaki, which is in our prefecture. Who knew I would live so close to the home of my all time favorite apples!!

(10/26) Monday- I've never been so happy it was Monday before in my life!! Eric has today and tomorrow off in compensation for working the whole weekend! Today we headed off to the capitol city of Aomori to do some shopping and to get out of Ajigasawa for a few hours. We had quite a successful day in the fact that it is pre-season winter sports sale! Eric finally bought skis to go along with his season pass and was very happy because he got such a great deal! I also got a new winter coat and some perfume, we hit up Toys 'R Us, and the foreign foods store AND Eric also took me to Baskin Robins :) We had McDonalds for lunch and delicious Korean BBQ for dinner, it was quite a day! We had a great time today exploring the city on our own, and we did a pretty decent job of navigating!

(10/27) Tuesday- After a long stretch of incredibly long days, we slept in until almost 11am today! It was fantastic! Today we decided to stay in Aji and venture out and try to find Kuroykuma Taki (Black Bear Falls). It is a pretty famous water fall in our area, but no one could really tell us how to get there beyond the half way point but we figured we would give it a shot! It was not that hard to find, especially once we looked up the Kanji and therefore knew what signs to follow! The drive was much like the road to Hana... but this time I didn't hate it. It was a very small windy, partially unpaved road, with many bridges. The big difference was that we were about the only car on the road! There were several small waterfalls and creeks as well as some beautiful dams along the way. We finally reached the parking space and then made the short hike up the falls. On our way up we passed a couple that was coming down, I am pretty possitive that they had just gotten engaged at the falls because the girl was practically skipping down and kept staring at her ring, and based on how shiny it was, I am pretty sure it was brand new. We were very excited for them! Anyway, we finally made it up to the falls, and of course, it was beautiful, especially being surounded by the fall colors! After our journey to the waterfall we ran some errands in town, including opening up a savings account at the bank, which we did successfully without a translator!! Victory! (Thanks to Eric who was very brave and wrote in Kanji extremely well!)

(10/28) Wednesday- Today was an exciting mail day! We not only got a package from Eric's parents packed full of delicious contents, but we also got a letter with pictures from the Brenna's! Thanks guys! It was great, I had just started to wind down from the excitement of the package when i heard another thud in the mailbox and i found the letter! Double mail- that's something that hasn't happened yet! Since we got a package with more Taco Seasoning, and we happened to have salsa AND chips in the house... we had Taco night!!!! MMM MMM Delicious! What a great end to week 12!