Xmas shopping

Ayako and I went Xmas shopping yesterday. We did a solid 7 hours of shopping and amazingly, we finished all of the shopping in one day. I've never finished shopping in one day before. We went shopping at a mall and downtown. Downtown was all lit up with lights and the giant tree with lights was up. Here's a (fuzzy) photo of Ayako with our shopping bags and the next photo is of the tree downtown.

Picking Mandarins (Mikans)

Today, Ayako and I met our friends Eiki & Ryoko and went picking mandarins (or mikans as they are called in Japan) near our house. Many of the of the houses near ours also own land nearby where they grow mandarins. They sell their mandarins to supermarkets but also sell them outside their houses for a third of the price. Since they are our neighbours though, we have been receiving a steady stream of them for free though. One of our neighbours allowed us to go pick mandarins in their field. We actually went with our neighbour's younger brother & wife (in their late 70s) since they have more energy for picking the mandarins. Here are some photos I took from today (the first one from the mandarin field, which overlooks the town where we live):

Quick Response

A little while ago, there was an announcement on the overhead speaker by my house that there was a fire in the area and they were asking for all volunteer firefighters to come as quickly as possible. The fire was down my small street at the end (about a 5-minute walk from my house). In about 10 minutes, there were about 5 firetrucks and 5 fire and police cars at the scene. As well, there were about 20 volunteer firefighters from the houses near by running past my house in their fire outfits. In the end, I think the fire was quite small since the first firetruck there only stayed about 5 minutes before leaving. Still though, I was very impressed with the response time and feel safe if there is ever a fire even closer to my house.

Another Japanese Tradition video

Previously, I had posted a funny video about eating sushi in Japan. I found another one today about origami. Very amusing, enjoy:

Looking for red leaves

On Sunday, Ayako and I met up with our friends, Eiki and Ryoko, and went up to Mori-machi to visit Okuni shrine:
I went up there the past two years as well since it's a good place to see red leaves in fall, although unfortunately, this year the leaves are a bit late and so there weren't as many red leaves as we had hoped.
We did get to see some of the kids dressed up for shichi-go-san, which is a traditional rite of passage in Japan for three and seven year-old girls and three and five year-old boys:
We could also see brand new cars being blessed by Shinto priests:
I have often played just a bit with my camera for trying new shots, but on this day, I tried to using the manual setting and was able to get some good shots. Here are some of the photos I took:

Shoji (paper sliding doors)

Today I was busy getting our house ready for winter. There are a number of paper sliding doors (shoji) that needed their paper desperately changed. The paper had been attached using a special glue and luckily I had a special solvent to loosen the glue to remove the paper. Luckily, the new paper that I'm using already has a sticky substance on one side of the paper. All I have to do is place the paper over the door and by using an iron, the paper becomes attached. The second benefit is that the paper can be easily removed in the future by heating it with an iron again. Anyways, here's me hard at work on a very small door (actually just to let air flow through the room) and the finished product:

Thanksgiving dinner 2007

It was Labour Thanksgiving Day in Japan on Friday and we had our annual thanksgiving dinner, although this time, not at a teacher's apartment. We went to a place called Heart of Gold, which was very comfortable inside:

One of the teacher's at our school, Steve, had been telling me how he'd been doing lots of woodwork at the place before it opened, and I was very impressed with some of the work that I saw there:
Here are some photos before we got down to eating:

And of course we all very thankful once we tucked into the food:

Roland festival

If you look back at Nov. 2005 in the archives, you will see that I went to this Roland festival shortly after arriving in Japan. Roland makes pianos and synthesizers and some teachers at our school teach there. The festival is held for Roland employees and families and we were also invited to visit. The first time I went to the festival, I took a picture out the window of the lake and commented on what a beautiful view they had. Luckily now, I have almost the same view from our house. Since the Roland centre where the festival is held is just a 5-minute walk from our house, it was no problem to get there. We watched a few of the bands performing there and enjoyed some of the food they were serving. They also had horse rides and a petting zoo this time:Ayako and I enjoyed playing with the baby chicks. I taught Ayako how to hypnotize the baby chicks, which was fun:

View of Mt. Fuji

These days, the temperature has been dropping and the wind has been picking up, which means that winter is on its way, but also that Mt. Fuji is visible from our city now. I was happy that I could see Mt. Fuji from outside my apartment downtown, but I'm even more happy and surprised that I can see it from our house beside the lake. There is a perfect dip between two hills from our window that shows us a small view of Mt. Fuji with snow on its peak already.

Ayako's birthday

Yesterday was Ayako's birthday. We had a fairly quiet day at home. I did the cooking for her during the day and gave her a file keeper to organize the many recipes she has. Here's a photo of the pizza that we made for dinner and a lemon meringue pie that Ayako made:
After dinner we went to a new shopping mall called Sunstreet, which was only a so-so mall in my opinion. We went there for the opening night of the movie, Bourne Ultimatum. We both liked the movie except that we didn't like the ending and that there were too many loose ends not wrapped up. It seemed to us like they wanted to leave room for yet another sequel. Overall though, Ayako said she had a good day.