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| Complete insanity at Man'yo no Mori |
We seem to have developed a routine. All week, the kids go off to school from 7:30- 3:00 and John goes to work until about 5. Jane and I putter about the apartment, go for walks, grocery shop, clean, read, make meals, etc. It gets dark here by about 5, so we don't usually go out at night. On the weekend, when we are all together, we try to have adventures by going to interesting places and learning about Japan. We have a street map of Hamamatsu in Japanese. A bus map of Hamamatsu, in Japanese. Several copies of various visitors' guides to the area, in both Japanese and English-this is our Rosetta Stone. We also have some information from the Web (WikiTravel) in English. We pick a place to go form the English description. We can get a rough idea of where it is from the tiny tourist map. Then, we take the Japanese tourist map and figure out the Japanese words for the place we want to go. From there, we look for it on the street map. This map also lists the bus stops, but doesn't tell you what bus line you need. Now we have to turn to the bus map to try and find the name of the bus stop (in Japanese, of course,) and from there, figure out what line it is on. Wouldn't it just be easier to speak and read Japanese?
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| Train passengers |
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| On the Entetsu train |
This weekend, we had read about a festival at Manyo no Mori Park in Hamakita. This would be the farthest afield we have tried to go, and it meant we could try taking the light rail line that runs from the city center to Tenryu, on the northeast side of the city. We found the park on the street map, but the bus lines were tough. If we took the train, it was really unclear which bus we would need to catch to make it from the station to the park. Luckily, Hamamatsu has a Tourist and Visitors office at the main train station downtown. We had to go there anyway to catch the light rail line up to Hamakita. The nice lady there told us that it was not the Entetsu bus line that we were familiar with, but a local line just for Hamakita. She seemed to think we could figure it out. She gave each of the children a nice bag with some souvenirs and tissues (they are big on tissues here!) We treated ourselves to bento boxes (and bagels for the kids!) from the station and we were ready to go.
One of the fascinations of Japan is that big companies have so many disparate businesses. One of the biggest, fanciest department stores downtown is Entetsu- they have a Tiffany's branch IN THE STORE-little blue boxes and all. They also run a chain of high end grocery stores, like Whole Foods, and inexplicably, they run the city bus line, and one of the light rail lines. Today from the Entetsu train line, we went past the Entetsu driving school. I wouldn't be surprised if they ran nursing homes, appliance manufacturing or factory farms, too. I would gladly fly on Entetsu Air, if it existed. All the Entetsu businesses are clean, effecient and well run. The bus and train are affordable, too.
When we arrived in Hamkita, we were able to find a bus stop at the station that had Manyo no Mori on the sign. The driver said he was going there, and when he dropped us at the stop, made sure we were pointed in the right direction. This time, I was smart enough to cross the street and look at the times for the returning bus- there were only 2 buses an hour - none at all between 1 and 2. I had even remembered to wear a watch, so we were in good shape.
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| temple |
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| Torri and stairs |
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| Performers playing koto |
It is easy to find the parks in Japan: Just look for the tall trees. We wound our way up the hill into the cedars. We found a path that led to a steep stair with but gate at the bottom. At the top was a temple. We followed the kimono dressed crowd around and behind and into the park. Like all things Japanese, it was cute. The main part was a beautiful contemplation garden with a meandering stream. For the festival, small wooden platforms had been decorated with colored clothes and lined the stream at discrete intervals. A group of women played koto. This festival is to celebrate Man'yo culture, poetry, art, and music. I don't know what that means, exactly, but this is the traditional Japanese culture of the Nara period. Almost immediately, a group of paparazzi swarmed over Jane and Kate. They asked politely if Jane would stand near the koto playing ladies and have her picture taken. She did it, but refused to smile and gave them instead, THE LOOK. Thank you Grandma Kamer. Japanese photographers are undeterred by Grandma Kamer's Look, unfortunately, so I had to rescue her. We poked around looking for a place to eat our lunch and ignored the photographer' pleas to come and get dressed up. Sometimes it is a good thing to not understand (or pretend to not understand) the language.
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Fine, I'll stand here, but I won't look
at you. |
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| Finding just the right outfits |
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| We become media darlings |
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Paparazzi leave and I finally
get a shot of happy
crayfish spotters |
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| Katy joins the choir |
While munching on lunch (eel, anyone?), we watched a hands on craft area where ladies were dyeing silk scarves. A choir began to sing over near the pond/stream, and we noticed children dressed in Nara period clothing wandering about. Katy and Jane love to dress up, but what would we be getting into? We wandered under a lovely wisteria covered arbor to an area with people taking koto lessons, fruit and vegetables for sale, a table with ladies in kimono serving soup, and a tent with satin clothes outside. Katy and Jane were herded over and asked to wait until another group of kids were finished dressing. The photographers gathered like flies on a fresh carcass. The nice ladies dressed up the girls and then they were told to go stand under the umbrella. I wasn't sure how they would handle the attention, and they did fine, but weren't up for smiling. After a few minutes, the girls were herded over to the stream and asked to sit on one of the platforms. They seemed fine with the attention, and once Will spotted a crayfish, Katy and Jane used their excellent vantage point to find more. I had a hard time getting a decent picture of them since so many people were in the way. It isn't any wonder that so many celebrities are wackos. This would drive anyone nuts. After a few minutes, we walked back to get the girls changed. The choir that had been singing at the lop of the garden earlier was posing for a group photo. They beckoned for Katy to come over and they were thrilled to have her in their picture. This celebrity thing was getting a bit much. Finally we made it back the 20 feet to the dressing tent and got the girls changed. They ladies seemed to think that they could stay in costume as long as they wanted, but enough already.
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| Will's tunnel |
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| Rice! |
Will found a neat tunnel arbor that led to botanical garden with display areas of crop plants. It was cool to see real rice growing, and cotton.
Finally we wandered out of the park in search of drinks. John feels that you are never more than 500 feet from a drinks machine, and sure enough, he was right. We found one at the gift shop near the parking lot. We also picked up some cool Japanese bamboo pinwheels.
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| Actual real rice field |
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| Grey heron |
After getting to the bus stop 25 minutes early, and a quick consult on the map, we decided to walk back to the train station. It took almost exactly 25 minutes. The train came, we made it back to the city center and made a quick stop into ZaZa City (big downtown mall) to hit a bookstore we had read about with an English language section (Twilight novels anyone? No, how about Harry Potter or John Grisham?) Remarkably, we met up with Christiana, a just arrived German woman who lives in our building. She rode her bike down to the city center (one hour) and wasn't totally sure where she had parked it- she had someone write it out for her in Japanese. We gave her our English language tourist map and directed her to the tourist office in the train station. We also told her about the bus card and how useful it was. Hope she made it back!
We made it back and found out what happens when you are out of funds on your bus card. You scramble about trying to count out change while people queue up politely behind you. Not too embarrassing, but, . . . ok, it was pretty embarrassing. Oh well. Stupid foreigner. Like I've never done that at home before. . .
