Agricultural Festival

So today was Wadayama's Agricultural Festival. Aaron and I made our way to pick up our bikes at the train station where we left them yesterday. sigh. My really awful POS model bike got stolen. Annoying, yes, but now I won't have to pay almost $100 to trash it. Of course, now I have to spend that $100 on a new bike... damn. So, no bike, so we walked to the festival. Not surprisingly the Agricultural Festival was really geared towards farmers. Lots of tools for sale. Some antique dealers, and a lot of food vendors. Hooray! We had the best-ever fried chicken. Jenny had told us that the farmers used their own chickens- so they were slaughtered just a day or two ago. Absolutely delicious! Unbelievably tasty- I wanted to eat the stand! Also picked up some old-fashioned Japanese candy- basically little sugar balls of different flavors. All in all, the Ag Fest seemed like an old fashioned country fair. Small but fun.
Sadly, our Kobe hike was cancelled due to rain. So no big city trip. Instead we hit Toyooka, met up with Julius, and bought more winter supplies. Thanks to Julius for helping us with the cargo!
Tomorrow is Halloween, so I'm off to carve a Jack O' Lantern to take to school. No orange pumpkins could be found, so green will have to do.

Dirty Old Man

So I was going to my Japanese class [Wednesday nights in a nearby city]. I was waiting at a red light when this middle aged Japanese man rolls up on a bicycle. He said "Hello" in English. I say hello back. The light turns green and he keeps pace with me. I figure he wants to practice his English [not as common an occurence as JET told me, but it happens occasionally]. Then he says "Do you like to [mumble mumble] in bed?" Sure that I heard him wrong, I ask him to repeat himself [I asked in Japanese, to avoid any more miscommunication]. He says, in English, "Do you like to do in bed?" "What?!" I say, very sharply and kinda loudly. "Sex." he replied. Pretty skeeved out, creeped out by his rotting teeth, I speed up and shout "NO!" He took off without a word.
Pretty icky, kinda funny, definately a good story, but damn! I was hoping not to have any of those pervert run-ins. Of course, I was too shocked and icked to remember any of the useful words like "sukebe" or "seku hara" [thanks Chris- now I will never forget]. Yuck.

Rough week to follow the rough weekend. We soldiered through, managed to make it to the weekend, where we learned that most everyone had a bad week. weird, but reassuring. Highlights of the week include:
Alfredo dinner with Mike and Colleen, who searched high and low to find us an aloe vera plant [thanks guys!]. We named him Wallace. A few days later, we discovered an itsy bitsy spider on Wallace- the exact same shade of green! Due to the cute factor, said spider will be granted a stay of execution- but if he gets much bigger...
Spaghetti dinner with Nick and Jenny. We watched "House of 1,000 Corpses" afterwards- very solid straight-ahead horror flick courtesy of Mr. Zombie. Now to find "Devil's Rejects"!
We joined Chris for a sushi send-off. Our fave sushi chef is moving to the big city [well, somewhere bigger than our 17,000]. sigh. He was always so friendly and would make our favorite sushis as soon as we walked in. We shall miss him.
And the es mucho fantastico Fiesta hosted by Todd and Alicen! We were super excited to go, for a swingin' time as much as for the tasty food. Caught up with some pals, met some new cool people, ate a lot of Mexi food, drank some strong margaritas. My favorite part was watching Todd and James stay up all night [they were still at it when we left at 5 am! - we went to bed for a few hours, like the wimps we are.], drinking, talking crazy-talk, and generally competing for most entertaining person of the party.
Pair o' jerks that we are, Aaron and I totally forgot to take any pics at the party. sigh.
Next update will have Wadayama pics, so everyone can check out our little town. Oh yeah, and our Makudonarudosu.

Today's offering

Rough weekend. We ran out of gas on Saturday night, so no hot food. Showers were generously provided by our Official Saviors, Nick and Jenny. I fell down the stairs Sunday, scaring Aaron and bruising me. There were happier notes->
1.storytelling at the library was a blast.
2.donuts and strong coffee were procured on Saturday.
Our discoveries [see above] also provided merriment. I finally indulged in pumpkin ice cream. More pumpkin flavor, less cinnamon than in the states. Also available in pumpkin- pocky. Of course we purchased the gourd-flavored candy, who wouldn't?! Oh, and that cute little girl is from the festival last weekend. She's taking an offering to the god, and keeping a leaf in her mouth so she doesn't spit on the food. Lesson: Wine flavored KitKats good, saliva-slicked god offerings bad.

Crazy things we've seen

All right, for purely entertainment purposes we will regale you with some of the things we've seen:
Sushi: "weiner" with mayo and ketchup; okra; corn; pastrami; hamburger with ketchup; meatball; and something that looks like bacon, but apparently isn't.
Vending machines: batteries; gum; potato chips; beer. Those are the strange ones we've seen, but we've heard tell of: magazines; sex toys; and panties [yep, supposedly worn]. Our town is too small for the smutty stuff, so no pics.
gaijin traps: We really need pics of these. They're giant gutters that all foreigners are pathologically afraid of, with good reason! When the gutters aren't full of water, giant spiders, frogs, fish, and even crabs [we live in the mountains- crabs in the gutters are crazy!] live in them!

Shrine hauling

This is Jenny. She's the JHS ALT, her man Nick is behind the camera. I'm wearing two of the little rope bandanas, which made a few people laugh before a very concerned man begged me to "only wear one, please!" sigh. Being fashionable is hard in Japan.
Lucky Jenny was also picked for the street samurai's blindfolded sword tricks.
And here is the huge shrine Jenny, Nick, Aaron, and I got to haul through the neighborhood. Two drummers, two dancers, and lotsa drunken Japanese men. Ooh! and illumination!

Living situation

So here's [top to bottom] our apartment and the shrine behind us. We think the shrine is to the cicada god as the cicadas at the shrine were still shrieking after every other bug in the city was long dead.
This guy is selling whole salted fish at a matsuri [festival]. Very tasty, but these aren't gutted, meaning Marlene had a nasty, squishy surprise when she was eating one.

Finally!

So we've been here over two months, and our blog is finally up! Hurrah for us! We'll skip the catch-up and jump into a real report:
This weekend found us having an uber-Japanese experience. We went to Takeda and hauled a mikoshi [portable shrine]. We then indulged in some fantastic sake and a tasty bento. For afters, we went for a sake brewery tour, then continued up to a Buddhist temple that enshrines 4 gods. Were lucky enough to view the ancestral tablets and a Buddhist ceremony for some pilgrims. We then caught a train to Fukuchiyama, where we ate some udon while we waited for our transfer. Super Japanese day!