June 1, 2002

I think this will be a short entry -- the last two days were pretty long, and to be perfectly honest I kinda feel like crap.

Yesterday I took a long bike ride, towards the town of Ohara, which Kenji said had a nice beach. But I hate my book of maps. I suppose it's ok if you're driving and don't want to go off the main roads, and I suppose it's useful because the place names are in English too, but it doesn't give any indication of how to get off the main roads. It shows the side roads, in refreshing-looking yellow and green lines, but it gives absolutely no hint how to find them. Although the side roads have numbers and names, the map doesn't give them. And the main roads that I saw, were gas stations, convenience stores, large trucks, and deisel exhaust off into the distance.

So, after struggling with the map, and exercising every caution to avoid decorating the grill of a truck with my delicate body, it took me almost six hours to go a mere 40 miles. But I did find some very nice stretches. On one quiet shady road, the kind a bicylist fantasizes about while planning a trip, I found a Budhist temple -- Yakuouji. There I stopped, took a few photos, drank a glass of water, and talked with the care-taker briefly. I'm still grateful for the patience of strangers, who are willing to try to listen to my Japanese. I tried to ask him if the water here was medicinal (I saw the characters for water and medicine together in various places at the temple) and he gave me a gift of eye-drops.

I guess late May or early June are the off-seasons for Japanese beaches -- next to the beach was a strip of stores -- gift shops, little restaurants, and the like, but all closed.

I was a bit tired, but decided to reach Ohara, which was still another 15-20 miles. This also was pretty nice cycling - along most of the way was a wide strip for bicyclists and pedestrians, more evidence that the place gets a lot of visitors later in the year, maybe.

I didn't make it to Ohara -- with about 1/2 an hour of sunlight left, and only maybe 5 more miles to go, I decided to hurry up and get to the nearest train station, which happened to be in the tiny town of Taito.

The train ride was uneventful and pleasant, but involved changing trains twice, and a half-hour wait for the first train. So I spent possibly as much time waiting for trains, as I spent on trains. With another 5 miles to ride from the Yachimata station, I didn't arrive back at the farm until 10:30 pm. Kenji and Sumiko had stayed up to wait for me, with a spread of food, and beer to celebrate my return.

Today, I dropped some film off in town, did some grocery shopping, and cooked dinner. Sounds like not much, but I was really dragging all day. Also, the grocery store proved a challenge in its own right -- assuming I could read the labelling, I wasn't always sure that it was actually what I was looking for. For example, in looking for a bit of flour, I found a bag labelled "Furawa" (in katakana) which seemed like a good chance of being the basic white flour I am familiar with. But I couldn't know for sure it was wheat flour and not, say, rice flour. More information in kanji would have told me it was right, but I couldn't read it. I saw the character for cow on something that looked very much like a pint of milk, so from there guessed it was what I wanted.

The good news is, they really liked the dinner -- chicken cooked in tomato sauce with onion, garlic, eggplant, zucchini and basil, a salad made of spinach, tomatos, cucumber and bleu cheese ( I couldn't find any feta) and strawberry shortcake for dessert.

I've often heard that food is expensive in Japan, but I think it really depends on what you get. The produce was not necessarily higher -- a bit more than a dollar for a bunch of spinach, and very good spinach too. And the sea food seemed better, and slightly cheaper, than what I could find in Bellingham. On the other hand, some things were definitely more expensive -- six dollars for a pint of Hagen Daaz (spelling?) ice cream, for example. Dairy products in general seemed a lot more expensive. The things I mostly bought (canned tomatoes, butter, cheese, ice cream, strawberries, etc) were definitely higher. The total was about $40, including a snack before I returned to the farm.

I actually have been jogging every day, for about half an hour, at about 9am. Usually Kenji leaves Sumiko and me behind (Kenji has actually run in a couple of marathons) and we proceed at a pace about like a fast walk. Also every evening Kenji asks for about 20 minutes of my time for his Japanese class.

I realized today I only have four more full days here. I still need to figure out where I'm going after this!