Green Tea

We cooked a very nice dinner tonight of chicken goujons, veges and mash with spinach sauce. It was all going really well until we found we had no milk for the mash, so we decided to substitute with some of the sauce. It tasted just fine, but it was green. It was a very green tea!

Relay races

In one of my strange bouts of enthusiasm, I signed up to help out at the international plaza relay races, and in my normal fashion, there was no way I was going down by myself, so I cajoled Jo and Mike into it too. Our role was supposed to be "demonstrating and score keeping", but due to odd numbers on the teams, we found ourselves in the 30oC heat on a Saturday afternoon with a balloon between our knees and paper plates on our feet. I must say, when I signed up for it I was expecting kids, but the only people under 18 stood at the side with a bemused look on their face while their parents spun themselves round a baseball bat. No need to say, after that we desperately needed a pint, so took ourselves off for a swift one in cafe38.

Morioka Zoo

One sunny afternoon, Rick and I visited Morioka zoo. I had never been previously due to reports of animal cruelty, but it seemed ok actually. There were a few mangy looking raccoon dogs, and a slightly upsetting scene with lions in boxes, but other than that they seemed to have lots of space. And for only 400 yen, it was definitely a pleasant afternoon, and there were some amazing views as it is right up in the mountains surrounding Morioka.

Beer Tower

After watching the horse parade, we all went back to ours. Having decided as it was raining, we had nothing better to do than go and get hideously drunk somewhere. So we stocked up at the local offy. This was a task in itself as it was raining so hard, so just the 15 second dash from the car to the shop left us absolutely soaked. It is hard to describe the amount of water that can come from the sky when it rains in Japan. I am not joking when I say that in the time it takes to walk from a carpark to a shop, you end up looking like you have just had a shower fully dressed.

Anyway, weather aside, we had a good evening. We started building a beer tower, but then people started forgetting about it and crushing the cans (reflex recycling motion), and people moved onto the wine, so when we rebuilt it in the morning for the photo it looked a bit small for the amount we consumed. Rick tricked me and told me our neighbours had gone away for the weekend, so I did nothing about the fact that we were playing guitar and salsa dancing at 1am. Felt quite bad the next day when I looked out to see both their cars in the drive (#^o^#).

Chagu-chagu

The chagu-chagu horse parade is one of Iwate`s more famous festivals - I have no idea why. In theory it sounds really impressive - get about 50 horses, dress them up in traditional stuff, stick a small child in equally interesting clothing on top of it, and walk for about 3 hours. In reality, it is just a big line of horses with small kids on them. I have no idea how we thought we were going to fill an entire Saturday afternoon with this activity. So naive. But try we did. We met for breakfast and in our usual style spent the first 2 hours of our time in a coffee shop. We then watched the horses for 5 minutes, took some photographs, realised they all looked the same, and went for lunch. To be fair, if it had been a nice day we probably could have spent longer watching, but sitting on a riverbank in the drizzle isn`t really so fun.

We love nature!

Normally if someone told me "I found this on the floor. Would you like to try it?" my immediate thought would be to say no. But this was how I spent my Friday night. This group of people (they call themselves a circle, but that sounds too much like pointy hats and cauldrons to me) go around forests, lakes and the sides of roads collecting wild stuff, then all get together and eat it. This was their AGM, so they invited lots of extra people and had a big stuff-we-found-on-the-floor bbq. The food was actually really nice and I don`t appear to have suffered food poisoning, so all is well. Luckily, there was also a free supply of beer and sake, so I made sure to thoroughly steralise my insides by drinking my own weight in shochu. This also helped my Japanese abilities no end! All the people were very nice and I spoke to the Korean SEA for the first time since we both arrived 2 years ago.

Cheerleaders

One of the more scary things I have encountered in Japan in the "el". When I was told our school had cheerleaders, I was expecting cute 3rd year girls with pom-poms and short skirts, but in fact it is a group of very large boys with larger voices who do a crazy hand routine that looks a little like military air traffic control, while shouting very very loudly. One of the more entertaining shouts is "san-kyuuuu", which it took me a very long time to work out what it meant...say it enough times and you can work it out ;o)

Taiiku-Taikai

This is a huge opening ceremony for the inter-high school sports competition that will happen over the next few weeks. Every school comes from all over Iwate-ken to have a big cheering competition. All the schools line up on the stands and each has their own special cheer and dance and song. It is incredibly noisy and this year it was fairly hot too (not as hot as last year though, when people were dropping like flies with the heat). In total there were over 14,000 people in the ground. At the end, there is a massive rush onto the field and lots of people run around throwing water and generally going a bit mad.