Golden Week Madness

i hate golden week. it's absolute insanity anywhere you go. mom and i thought we would be safe outside the city proper so we went to kameido where there's a very nice shrine with tons of wisteria blossoms. but as you can see, a whole bunch of other people had the same idea:



mom is exhausted from clamoring her way up the bridge:



AAAARRRGGGGHHHHHH!!!!




the blooms were very pretty:





having a San Luis Rey moment:

Taknoko Time!

my cousin that lives in the countryside of kyoto went digging for baby bamboo on the mountain in his backyard. his mom sent some of them to us city folk. good thing mom was here cuz i wouldn't know what to do with that. check out the size of this baby:

first you boil it:

then you peel it:

see: you don't actually get to eat that much of it:

it's still pretty big though:

mom chops them up:

and slow cooks it in the pot:

tasty stuff! but there was SO much of it that i was sick of it after eating it for several days . . .

Game Night

our take on family game night. we made a big mexican feast and drank and played games all night. Jenga was a favorite but there was everything from poker to go fish.

2010: The Year of Correspondence

i have heaps and heaps of stationary. most people will usually get a birthday card, and postcards during the spring/summer and year end from me. i like sending them. i've even started sending one a week to select peeps who don't easily get annoyed with me.

it saddens me to see that real mail, snail mail if you will, has gone the way of the dinosaurs. i like to see people's penmanship, judge their grasp of grammar and syntax, check if they use words with correct connotation, etc. electronic communication has a severe lack of responsibility. i don't check my spelling, i rarely capitalize anything , and i often don't make sense. <-- it's like me talking! that's why i don't like it. the edited version of me is much better, and in a real letter, the best version of me is on paper.

i know i suck at text messages and emails. i often don't reply unless there are very specific questions that request a response. when i had a commute to work, i spent the time on the train replying to all my messages but now, for some reason, i just don't. So don't take it personally if i don't reply to your emails and messages. Send me your address so i can put a postcard in the mail for you!

it's Tanuki Time!

heard there were a lot of tanukis out in Mashiko, a small town in Tochigi, so i enlisted the help of my mom and uncle to go pick one out for my sister's birthday. i think my uncle had regrets about volunterring as soon as we got on the train. as you can see, he's having none of it.



boy's day carp:


i expected a lot more tanukis but apparently is just a small cluster of shops out there that sell tanukis. they don't even make them! i'm told that over 90% of all tanukis sold in Japan are from a small kansai town called Shigaraki. but there were quite a few tanuki paraphrenelia here:








and super big ones:



and stoned ones:




this is the chagama bunbuku tanuki that i got for my sister:


mom tries out the local dango:


and we have a fancy local lunch:



and even a few cherry blossoms to boot!