Exciting Discoveries

Here are some things I (Amy) have found these past two days, either while exploring here or at the malls in Takamatsu, the capital city an hour away. A friend took me yesterday, and it was so fun to be in a big city with two good malls. Here are some of my finds:
--A Sports Authority, Body Shop, and Gap
--A Grocery store in the mall (yes, all the malls have grocery stores in them) that had Pringles, popcorn, salad dressing, marshmallows, and spaghetti sauce.
--A coffee shop that sold pesto, Hansen's cola, oatmeal, salsa, every flavor of Celestial Seasonings tea, and Hershey's cocoa.
--A "King Size" store should Fox every need new clothes.
--The Japanese equivalent of Ikea--I can't remember the name.
--A bookstore that had English books and magazine ($20 a piece)
--And today, I went to the Marugame Library and found the English section, which is very tiny but it had "Zeralda's Ogre", a book my mom used to read to us and which I love.

Crazy finds, huh? Well, at least for me! I've never been more excited to get groceries in my life! If that seems strange to you, I remind you that we are living on the smallest island in Japan. It has probably the fewest Americans in the whole country, and, as a result, the least amount of American food.

P.S. What I didn't find:
Candy corn. Chocolate chips. Grape Nuts. Boohoo.

The Bottom Biting Bug!

The latest kid song craze in Japan is the Bottom Biting Bug. Fox and I first saw this a week ago on a variety show. There was a woman and a group of girls on TV dancing to the Oshiri song. Later, at the bookstore, the song was playing on a loop on the TV there, and a few girls stood around it singing the song. Apparently, the Bottom Biting Bug was created by an older couple who felt that Japanese people were minding their business TOO much. By "biting bottoms" and being nosy, you get to know people better. So, biting someone's bottom is like a warm, friendly conversation between the biter and bitee. I am posting this, because I can't get the song out of my head, and oh yeah, because biting bottoms to get to know others is so crazy it just might work!

Off House

Today we went to an eco-recycle (read: very nice pawn) shop called Hard Off/Off House. We were so excited to find some cheap things, as Japan is notoriously expensive! We were looking for toys for Cash, since baby stuff is ridiculously costly, and I found a crockpot! We were excited to find some cheap baby toys and took our pick to the counter. Well, once we got up there, they told us that we could only buy things there from Oct. 20-24. No wonder why we were the only customers in the store! Apparently, they spend all month buying from people and stocking their shelves and then open their store for only four days a month for people to buy. Otherwise, they would never have anything on the shelf! At least that's what we figured. Japan is not only super expensive, but Japanese people pride themselves on being frugal. Looks like we know where we're going bright and early on the 20th! ~Amy

Cash Takes A Stand

Today, Cash decided to pull himself up...in his crib! He was so proud of himself, as you can see from the video below.

Harvest Time

Yesterday we spent around a half hour in between our lessons watching the farmers harvest their rice from the firelds behind our house. I was amazed at the contrast between one farmer's harvesting technique and another's.
The farmer nearest us used a self-propelled machine that looked like a mix between a wood chipper and a lawn mower. He walked behind it, pushing it carefully up the perfectly-spaced rows of yellowing rice. His machine automatically wrapped string around the rice stalks as it cut them and then shot them out after having bunched the bound stalks. His wife (I assume that she was his wife) stood at the corner of the field closest to us. She seemed comfortable with the fact that I was photogrpahing her and treated us with a passive neglect. She would speak to us in loud rapid Japanese and then smile before looking back to her work. She bent over the stalks that the man's machine missed and, using what looked like a vey old kamma, cut the stragglers before tossing them of to the side for later binding. After they finished binding several rows of rice, they hang the stalks upside down on poles so that the sun would dry out the stalks and make it easier to knock the rice off.
The operation going on at the field furthest away from us was much less back-cracking. A single farmer rode a machine much larger than the aforementioned farmer's binding machine. This large machine looked like an angry mix between a riding mower and a zamboni. He would drive his machine up the lines of rice, and the machine would bunch and cut the rice stalks. It did not bind them, though. Instead, it pulled them up a conveyer belt to the back of the riding zambower, where the rice was shaken off of the stocks right there. The stalks were ejected out of the zambower's backside. The rice was shot into several bags that were mounted to the side of the zambower. Other farmers would walk around the farmer on the riding rice-eatting beast, picking up the stalks for later burning. Others walked alonside it and let him know when the bags of rice were full enough for changing. Then he would stop while the men on the ground would change out the bags on his beast of burden.
The level of complexity in this second operation led me to believe that the crew working in the far fields was working for a government-owned business. The closer couple were more likely a family harvesting their own personal rice. That is all speculation though, because that is far too complicated of a theory for my meager Japanese to inquire about (never end a sentence in a preposition, evne if you have to put a weird statement in parenthesis in...to the statement... alright? yeah; that's good).
The second operation made the farmer and his wife working so close to us seem worthy of our pity. I wanted to run out hot bowls of the Lentil soup Amy had just made; I figured it would help them replenish their energy. I decided against it as I thought that a hot bowl of food is not the most desired thing when performing manual labor on a hot day. I decided to offer them some lemonade, but realized that the last of our lemon was already used up. By the time I started thinking about just taking them a simple glass of water, I realized that I couldn't hear them working anymore. I went outside to see that they had already taken off for lunch. Luckily, they will be harvesting all week, so I'll have another chance.


The farmer closest to us pushing his mechanical plow.


Him a little closer now



His lovely female assistant



The stalks of rice hung to dry in the sun and the cleared out rows below that



The operation further away from us


The assistant cleared out some stalks from the feeder before switching out the rice bags.


Going again. Notice the size of the rice bags next to the worker on the ground. You could feed a family for a few months with one bag, unless you happen to have all boys. Then that bag would only last three weeks. ~Fox

Spiders anyone?

Today, we went for a walk. It was a cloudy day, and the spiders were out. We live among fields of rice, which is a popular area for the large joro-gumo, the Queen of Japanese Spiders. Their webs are between lampposts, in the irrigation ditches, between trees, and in our bushes. Looking up, you will see webs across phone wires, but it looks as if there are spiders dangling in the air. The webs are huge and super reinforced. We touched the edge of one, and it was like touching starched, steel fishing wire. The scary part is that there is usually a huge female in the center of the web, and then several "smaller" males lurking on the outside waiting to mate. These spiders are everywhere, and I get shivers just thinking about them. I feel like I'm in Arachnophobia!

Things that go bump...

Things that go bump in the middle of the night are usually Fox's head or nose against the doorframes of our house. We have a sliding partition to separate our kitchen and living room, and that's low as well. He's been a good sport about it so far, but hopefully he doesn't get back problems from constantly stooping down.