Sake sampling night

On Friday night, I attended a sake sampling at Heart of Gold, which is where I went for last year's Thanksgiving dinner. A friend, Matt, was holding the event and also provided some delicious food as well:
I met the local sake expert, Robert, and was treated to lots of interesting information about different types of sake from Shizuoka as well as the history of sake in this prefecture. Here is a picture of me with Robert below:
Robert had brought four types of sake from one local brewery for us to sample. We drank them in increasing order of quality. The first two went well with the food we were eating. The third was quite nice by itself. The last and best one had quite a complex taste to it and I found it went well with the ice cream that we had for dessert, although not everyone agreed with me on that.
Later on, some others joined us to help finish the bottles we had started. Although this group has met before a few times, it was my first time. I was glad to find out about this group since I haven't met many others who enjoy finding out about the different types of sake and examining them closely. I'm looking forward to the next time the sake sampling group meets.

Spring cleaning

This weekend has been mainly doing some cleaning up as well as doing some painting. There are some concrete floors in our house that I'm painting a lovely shade of green (only colour you can get for concrete). And so since that's not much to take a photo of, I'll show you the photo I took earlier this morning, when there was a nice reflection on the lake just before the sun came up.

Meeting the neighbours

When Ayako and I moved into our house last July, we went and introduced ourselves to the neighbours close to us. At the time though, we didn't join the local community group since it halfway through the year. In Japan, April is the start of year for many things including businesses, schools, as well as our local community group. So Ayako and I officially joined the group this month, paid our dues, and voted for this year's leader. Our community is the local 18 houses near us, and yet we had not met all the neighbours yet. So on Saturday night, there was an annual party for our group that we joined for the first time. We went to a local restaurant and rented a room we we enjoyed wonderful food. Our neighbour across from our house, Terasawa-san, even did some magic tricks during the night:
Here he is doing another magic trick with a coin:
It was interesting that I hadn't met many of the people who came out to the event last night, since many of them were the husbands who are working during the day. The local people I often meet are retired and are in their 70s or 80s and they decided to miss the party. Anyways, it was a good party and a good test of my Japanese.

Viewing cherry blossoms

Over the weekend, I got to go see the cherry blossoms two more times. The first time was on Saturday, where our school had a hanami (cherry blossom viewing) party. You can see the park we went to had lots of trees in full bloom:
Here's a shot of some of us having a picnic in the park:
Ayako and I stayed until dark. All the cherry blossom leaves that had dropped in the pond looked even nicer at night:
The next day we planned to see more cherry blossoms. Close to our house on Sunday, we passed a peach tree that is also in bloom at this time of year. This type of peach tree is extra nice since the leaves are either white, pink or dark pink, all on the same tree:
On Sunday, we were actually going to our local town's festival. You can see the festival in the distance with many cherry blossoms in view along the river:
We actually walked from our house with Heather and Stef. It was about a 45-minute walk:
The town has a parade during the festival. Everyone in the parade was dressed in traditional (Edo era) costumes. Check out the shoulders on these guys:
The festival is actually called the Princess Way and so here is the picture of the princess (for a day) going by us:
Ayako and I actually went to this same festival last year, and so you can see similar pictures if you look under April 2007 on my blog.