Recent Outings

Here are a few pictures from some of our recent outings. A few weekends ago we went to dinner at a sushi restaurant for kids. There was a conveyor belt that had fresh sushi, drinks, fruit, french fries that went by every table and your could take a plate off the belt. Each plate was 100 yen and at the end a waitress came and counted how many plates you had. You could also order food from a touch screen at each table that would bring you your food on a little train that looked like the shinkansen (Japanese bullet trains). The kids loved the restaurant and you can probably guess what the kids ate!

Julia and Luke had no school on Monday September 16th so we headed to the Hiroshima zoo. It was a huge beautiful zoo with lots of animals, a petting zoo, a splash pad/river play area, a carp feeding pond, and huge playground. It completely wore the kids out- my mission completed!

 

 You can see Cameron's bandaid where he crackedh is head open on our entertainment center the night before. The cut was pretty deep and gushing blood and we thought about taking him to the ER. Instead I ran to the pharmacy/ Walgreen type of store and picked up some super glue. Cleaned it out, super glued it together, and now it is as good as new!!

LDS Hikari Ward, Hiroshima

As members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) we attend a local congregation called the Hikari ward. It is a Japanese congregation (meaning the whole service is conducted in Japanese) and there are two other American families that attend every Sunday with us. Around 80-100 people attend the congregation every Sunday, which is small compared to Utah but not much smaller than congregations in other parts of the states and the world.  Even though we don't speak any Japanese and their English is limited, they have tried very hard to welcome us. Recently the relief society (women's organization) of the ward held a cooking activity where we learned to cook "American muffins".  One of the other American ladies and I attended the class. You might think it is silly to attend a cooking class on making American food, however baking here in Japan is completely different than baking in the USA. The muffins were more like cupcakes, as I think they were trying to imitate Costco's muffins.   Here is a picture of some of the ladies who are in our ward (and one of the husbands who snuck in for a treat) and the other American sister.

  

Presentation is huge in Japan. This was an example of how to wrap the muffins!

 

 Picture of the sister missionaries. The missionary on the right is a brand new missionary from Hawaii. She helped translate a bit for us and we helped her cook!

 

 

My attempt to replicate!

 

Mike and I are amazed at the members of the church here in Japan. To be a member here requires a huge amount of sacrifice. It requires long commutes to church, long train rides to do your home teaching and visiting teaching, and a lot of financial sacrifice to pay tithing. The members will spend their entire Sunday commuting to church, fulfilling their callings, and doing their home teaching and visiting teaching. One sister told me she leaves for church around 9am with her 1 year old baby and often returns home around 6:30pm. I can't imagine wrestling a 1 year old baby for 9 hours at church meetings.

 The Japanese business culture creates a lot of obstacles for members too, especially priesthood holders. The Japanese business culture makes it difficult for priesthood holders to keep the word of wisdom. It is considered an honor to be invited out to dinner with your boss. Many business dinners in Japan include alcohol and large amounts of sake (Japanese alcohol). It is considered offensive to not drink with your boss.

Due to these obstacles, most members of the church here own their own business or are doctors. Owning your business can be prosperous, but often is very time consuming and most members struggle financially.  Doctors are part of the socialized medical system here so they are not as wealthy as doctors in the USA. There are many, many, many sisters who attend without their husbands.

It has been a good reminder and example for Mike and I to see the amount of service the Saints provide here!

 



Let's talk about being an expat

Living somewhere new is exciting and adventuresome! I love waking up everyday and thinking about what new thing I should go explore with Cameron on the back of my bike, or who I might meet today, or being surprised by who might turn around and try to speak English with me. I really love living in a smaller place with less stuff. Less space to clean, less clutter to put away, and less of engaging in the endless motherhood struggle of balancing housework and spending time with my children. I also love not being in the "motherhood wars" you experience when you live in a more homogenous society. Everyone here looks at me and says American and that seems to explain why my kids are full of energy, excellent screamers, and masters of chaos! No one talks my ear off about how great his/her child is at soccer, how his/her child is taking a piano and karate and baseball and ballet and whatever genius class they can find!

After a while you even begin to feel like you might fit until you have what is call one of those gaijin moments. These are the times when you quickly remember that you are thousands of miles from home and you are still know very little about what is truly going on around you. Here are just a few of these moments I recently had:

* Last week a family from our church congregation invited us to their home for dinner. The whole family speaks pretty good English and they have been extremely nice to us. It is Japanese tradition that when you go to someone's house you bring them a gift. So... what did I think to bring? Flowers. I stopped by the grocery store and picked up a bouquet of mixed white flowers and a bouquet of chrysanthemums.

  

This past Sunday, Sister Shimoto pulled me aside and kindly let me know that the flowers I brought her were Buddhist graveside flowers. Not only is she not Buddhist, but no one is dying in her family. We both laughed about it, but I still felt a bit stupid!







*A few weeks back, in the middle of the afternoon all of a sudden bells started ringing, sirens were blaring outside, and my phone started buzzing. I looked outside and nothing seemed out of the ordinary. People weren't running away from anything and I couldn't find anything in English on tv to give me any clues, so I ignored it and went about my day. A few hours later Mike texted me and told there was an earthquake in Tokyo and that was the local alert system.  I thought wow! If there was something really wrong, would I ever know!!!

*In Japan you drive on the left hand side of the road, but on the sidewalk I can never figure out which side to ride a bike on or walk on and it seems like no one else can either. For the first few weeks we were here I would watch very carefully to see what the majority of the people were doing. But I soon quickly realized there really was no system to the sidewalks. So..... a few days ago I was riding my bike over the bridge on my way to the grocery store when a cyclist came from the other direction riding my way. I was riding in the middle of the sidewalk to I pulled to one side. At the same time the cyclist pulled to the exact same side. Each time I pulled to one side, the cyclist would move to that exact same side. In the end we literally just crashed into each other. Luckily we were going pretty slow by that time and no one or nothing was hurt. I could tell the cyclist was frustrated at me and all I could say was a bad attempt at saying sorry in Japanese a million times over!!

 

All in all though we are having a great time in Japan and here are a few pictures from the past few weekends of some hiking we did along the Seto Islands landmarks.

 

Mable and the Shukkeien Garden

Mable, Mable, Mable...................! For the past week we have had the privilege to have Mable the stuff animal join our family from Julia's school class. Mable had to go everywhere with us! Mable went to the Shukkeien gardens, the ocean, the grocery store, church, bike rides, etc...! By the end I cursed Mable because she kept getting lost (Julia is a bit forgetful to say the least) and dirty. We must have said a dozen prayers asking for help to find Mable and she ended up in the washing machine too. I also heard all week- Can we get a pet Mom? Oh Mable, the fun you brought this week!

 

Anyways...  on Friday we went to the Shukkeien Garden in Hiroshima. It is directly across the river from us and a short bike ride for us. It is a beautiful traditional Japanese garden. The kids had a great time following the paths, walking the bridges, and feeding the carp fish.  Despite the occasional high-rise peeping over the trees, it felt like an entirely different world, little paths crossing ponds on bridges and winding their way around graceful teahouses and waterfalls

 

 One o the few moments of Zen Julia and Luke have ever taken in their life! Had to take a picture!

 

We met our friends the Stewart family, who are expats from Boise, Idaho, at the gardens. They have a daughter who is in the same class at school with Julia. After the gardens Becky and I took our kids to a Ramen restaurant and Mable had a great time slurping the noodles with Julia and Alissa!

After the rain!

Japan has entered typhoon season and that means rain like I have never seen before. It rained straight for 8 days. You would fall to sleep listening to heavy rain and wake up with the same heavy rain. The rain never let it up! One typhoon came in and then a low pressure system from China came right after. By the end of the 8 days I thought I was going to go crazy. After living in Utah and Idaho for the past 15 years or so, I wasn't use to consistent rainy gray days! When the rain finally broke Cameron and I decided to hop on our bike and ride the bike paths around Hiroshima. Here are some of the sights we saw!

 A good picture of one of the many forks in rivers here in Hiroshima.

 

 All around the city you will find shrines and temples. Often you won't even notice them because they are smack dab in the middle of downtown surrounded by buildings. We came across this small shrine along the bike path.

 

 A view of the bike path.

 

I stopped half way along our ride and let Cameron play at a playground. He spent most of the time chasing the pigeons with his stick!

Roof top soccer

Julia and Luke are signed up for soccer at the Hiroshima YMCA. The school bus drops them right off at the YMCA and I meet them there. Last week was their first day of soccer and they hold the classes and games up on the roof of the YMCA. I couldn't get over the amazing view from the roof of the city! The kids had a good time, but quickly realized that soccer not on grass is much harder. Don't tell them, but they kind of got schooled by the Japanese kids! The Japanese kids had amazing ball control skills!

Poor Julia was exhausted by the end!