Tama Zoo

We had a great trip to the Tama Zoo with some friends on the first day of J's school vacation!

Kimono

We had the opportunity to have J try on a kimono this week.  Some friends from school offered to let J borrow their kimono for a traditional picture that children have at his age.  As you can see it was quite a process getting him dressed.  Three different moms helped and they used instructions!

Cute family picture.

The true to life picture!

So it's been a while since my last post on account of hubby is pretty much flat on his back sick. Thus we don't have any cool pictures or accounts of fun events in the last few weeks.  I have however learned a lot of things this past week.  Number one of course has to be how much Hubby does that I don't realize, especially in Japan.  

2.  I CAN find my own headache medicine in the drug store if B tells me what to say to the pharmacist.

3.  I can return books to the library and ask for the ones that I have requested, again with B's help with the Japanese.

4.  Sick kids can be taken to the doctor by their non-Japanese speaking mother.

5.  General entertainment of the children...(Thanks to lots of nice people who try to understand what I'm saying in Japanese.)

You get the idea.  Here's hoping B gets better soon!

Happy Thanksgiving!

 I hope everyone had a happy Thanksgiving.  We did, thanks KFC.

Shinjuku Gyoen

I've wanted to visit Shinjuku Gyoen for a couple of weeks now for one reason, Japanese Maples! I was supposed to go on Wed. with a group of friends from J's class, but just as S was getting over the stomach flu J caught some coughing thing.
So Saturday morning I dragged my now mostly healthy family to Shinjuku. We had a great time at the park and bought Krispy Kreme on the way home without having to wait an hour in the line. Yeah! Too bad I've eaten them all already.

It reminded me a bit of central park with nice open areas and the stark contrast of buildings against the park setting.

Origami is a wonderful thing!  J and his friends were seriously kept entertained for 20+ minutes with just a little stack of paper.  

Also I have learned that it's okay to eat potatoes and radishes (daikon) as long as you are at school and everyone else thinks they are fine to eat.  It's one of those don't try this at home gigs though, it can't be replicated at home.  

S has been throwing up and sick for a week.  One nice thing about moving to a foreign country where you don't speak the language, but hubby does, is that you aren't the one who has to take the sick child to the doctor.  I'll add it to the list.

Garbage

In his book Living in Japan, Andy D. Para writes, "Taking care of the garbage may be the least of your worries, but to your Japanese neighbors, it's a high priority. In fact, improper garbage disposal ranks high on the list of gripes Japanese have about their non-Japanese neighbors. So if you want to develop friendly relations with your neighbors, find out the local requisites for garbage disposal. Then do it right."

In this environmentally conscious age in which we live, you have no doubt heard of the three "R's:" Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle.  Japan has informally created a fourth "R," Responsibility. Accordingly you must take full responsibility for your own garbage. Enforcement of this responsibility requires the cooperation of government agents, community volunteers,  merchants, and consumers.   If you don't do it right and refuse to cooperate with the system, that is when problems arise. The term public sanitation quickly morphs into an Orwellian example of double speak.

Here is what typically happens twice a week. Everyone puts their trash out in a big pile by the side of the road and covers it with a green net, to keep the ravenous  crows away.  Next the city trucks drive by , take off the net, and pick it up.

  But if the trash collectors (a.k.a. garbage police) see something in your trash that is not sorted correctly (i.e. a plastic sushi tray inside the bag for burnable garbage) then they don't pick it up. Instead they put a warning sticker on it and leave it uncovered on the side of the road. Then the crows come and tear the bag apart, spreading the garbage up and down the street. Now it is your RESPONSIBILITY to go down and pick up your garbage, correctly sort it and put it out again next time. But that seldom happens; people just pretend that it is not their bag of garbage that the crows are sprinkling up and down the block. 

Now it becomes everyones RESPONSIBILITY to curse at the crows and the city, ignore the trash spread everywhere, and track down the culprit and publicly shame them. (Sorry about the low quality image--I took a photo with my cellphone and then emailed it to myself. But you can still see trash by the lovely bushes.)

Although the garbage standards have actually just gotten easier, this little change has thrown the whole system into confusion and the crows are getting fat.
Needless to say we still recycle a lot. PET bottles, glass bottles, tin cans, milk cartons, Styrofoam trays, and separate burnables and non-burnables. It is not optional, they won't pick it up otherwise.
We now abide by this 7 page pdf memo for all of our garbage needs. http://www.city.setagaya.tokyo.jp/english/gomi/gomi.pdf

Here's what I (Be.) do with my milk cartons. First, I buy the milk; I try not to pay more than the equivalent of $2  per liter, but sometimes I do have to pay more. So I figure about $6-$8 a gallon. Next, I bring it home on my bike and we drink it-- My 1.5 year old needs 3 eight oz. glasses a day! That's a lot of milk to carry home, but don't worry, I have my bike with its built in basket.

After we're finished I rinse it.

Then open it and allow it to dry.

Then I cut it so that it lays flat like this. And we take it back to the grocery store so that they can recycle it. It's a full circle, only I don't get my 5 cent deposit back.

Then we take it back to the store for recycling. 

I think my friend Sam would be proud!

It's all downhill!

On Monday it was a holiday here in Japan (Culture Day 文化の日).  We decided to visit some Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines.  We rode our bikes to a district, Teramachi, that has 26 different temples and shrines. It was about a 25 minute city-bike ride away (I have no idea how many miles it equals). On the way there Bu had the bike with the kids in it.  I made the comment that the ride home was going to be harder since we were traveling downhill to get there.  However, when we were riding home, Bu took the kids again,  it still felt to me like we were going downhill.  Strange.  It then occurred to me that I am used to riding my bike around Tokyo with two children in tow-- an extra 75+ pounds.  If you get rid of the children and take your Bu's bike for an afternoon it amazingly makes you feel like you are riding downhill all day.  So for any of you training for that next bike race or Triathlon come visit.  I'll lend you my kids and my bike for a couple of days.  It's all downhill after that!

Bu and I jokingly call this our SUV!  And although I tend to still hold my breath whenever I am passing a car on a narrow road or a pedestrian or a bike on a skinny sidewalk, I am getting attached to the bike. 

J ringing the bell at the Shinto temple.

Watashitachi no Aparto (Our Apartment)

This post is in response to voyeuristic-requests for a look at our apartment.  Our apartment is considered in Japan to be a 3DK.  Or three rooms (3) and a dining room (D) kitchen (K).  The rub is that we have just enough space in our kitchen for a table, which makes it a dining room. But it is really hard to tell where the K ends and the D starts, since the refrigerator door hits the side of the table.  As for the other three more rooms in our house,  we use two for bedrooms and one for a family room.  We also have a bathroom with a washer in it and a separate room with a toilet.  Overall it's a lot more space than I thought we would end up with:)

This is just a random picture taken Halloween night, but it shows the outside of our apartment.  We live in the building on the left on the second floor.  Our balcony has some laundry hanging.

This is the room we use for the family room.

The Genkan.  Or entryway, where we leave our shoes.

Our Kitchen.

The bathroom with the washer one the left.  The door on the right leads to the shower and tub room.

The boys room.

Our futons.

Halloween

Halloween (ハロウィン） has become popular in Japan! (Wish I would have know this fact before coming; as I easily could have slid a couple of costumes into our suitcases.)  From what I could find, here in japan costumes run around ¥4,000+ or $40+, and the costumes are not ones my children would choose. Luckily we have a wonderful caring Grandma who saved our Halloween. J even was excited about the superhero costume; is there life after trains?  Thanks Grandma!

For Halloween, we didn't exactly go door to door trick-or-treating.  Instead, we went to an event sponsored and scripted by lady from England.  This morning she went around to some of her friends in the neighborhood and dropped candy off at their houses and explained to them exactly what to do when we came by. Tonight we met at a park and carved pumpkins (two for 30+ kids) and then went to door to door trick-or-treating at the homes where the candy had previously been dropped off.  There are other events in Japan around some of the train stations where stores will sponsor trick-or-treaters too. They tend to be very crowded and for the price of train tickets it would have been cheeper to buy our own candy. But, we had fun with those as well.  Overall a great Halloween!  

This is Bob the Builder and Iron Man.
J with some of his friends from school at the trick-or-treating party! (The men in uniforms in the background are firefighters--although they look like they are in costume.)

Shinkansen

Although we ride trains anytime we need to travel farther than we can get on our bicycles, we have yet to ride the Shinkansen (bullet train) this trip. We might not get a chance until the holidays. However, J already loves the Shinkansen. He reads about them in books at school, has a picture of one on his lunchbox, plays on an outside toy Shinkansen at school, and now we have one at our house. I think Japan was worth the trip just for the trains in J's mind.

Undokai! (Field Day)

I can't cover everything that has happen since we came to Japan; even thinking about it gives me a headache.  So I 'm just going to start this blog from Undokai.  Undokai, or Field or Exercise Day, is a really big deal in Japanese schools.  Moms and Dads take off work to come and watch as well and grandparents etc.  J's school had Undokai just after his first week there, so I had no idea what was going on.  It turned out to be a really neat event!

This was the ball game that the kids played.  There was a red team and a white team and each team tried to get as many balls as they could into the baskets before the time ran out.  J was on the white team and really enjoyed this game.

B and J doing a dance that the parents got to do with the children.   All orchestrated in Japanese of course.