To Sendai and Back: Part 2, the Side Notes

On Saturday late in the afternoon one of my friends called me to the tent and asked me to sit down. The next thing I knew, a group was standing around my chair singing “Happy Birthday” and a cake with candles appeared. It was a very special moment! Here are some pictures:

The cake - yes, that is a 5?, we'll leave it at that. That's my name in Japanese.

The Gang

Here are some pictures of the views on the road between the place that I stayed over the weekend and the trial site:

Sunrise in the mountains

Early morning mountain scene

The next two side notes are not related to this trip, but amusing nonetheless. The weekend before Sendai, we had some visitors and we all went to Saiko, a lake about an hour and a half from Tokyo near the base of Mt. Fuji for a few days. It is a beautiful area and Cody loves to swim in the lake. We decided to go visit a traditional village that was reconstructed after a landslide had destroyed the original village in the 1960s.

Mountain village

As we walked past the buildings, we noticed some shops. We stopped in one and found a bag of what appeared to be dried strips of pear (there was a picture on the front of the bag with a drawing of a green pear). The writing on the bag was all in Kanji, the Chinese characters that I haven’t learned yet. The contents looked delicious, so I purchased a bag and opened it up for us to try. After chewing on a piece for a bit, we concluded that the pear had been dipped in soy sauce and/or something fishy. Two of us stopped after one piece, the other continued to chew more and more of it. And it was chewy.

Finally he quit and I said that I would give the rest of the bag to my friends. The following week in agility class I brought it out and gave it away, explaining that we didn’t care for the taste of the pear. I asked whether it had been dipped in something else. They just laughed and laughed – it turns out that the product wasn’t pear at all, it was dried gourd called kampyo, and it was meant to be boiled with soy sauce and sugar before being eaten. Not to be eaten dried! No wonder it tasted so bad!

This was just one more example of my occasionally feeling like a toddler here, being aware of what is going on around me, but unable to read so relying a lot on pictures, however, sometimes they can fool!

And finally, I thought that you might be interested to see this advertisement on the local bus:

Bus advertisement

They love that show here – just as it’s loved in the US!

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