pictures

I got this new book about this kitty who plants a beautiful flower, it gets eaten by a caterpillar, so she bakes him a flower pie and he is to full to eat her flower anymore. It is all in cut-out felt and the cutest thing ever.

I put up some more pictures of Alex on Flickr, check them out!

killing time

Some of you may wonder what it is Alex and I do everyday while Nate is off teaching proper English to scared junior high school students.

One of Alex's favorite pass times is going to the train station and watching the trains. The walk to the train station is about ten minutes, if I am lucky I can get Alex to walk the whole way. Above is the view near the train station of a meadow of weeds, which is full of crickets and solidago, with the surreal background of a expressway in construction that we walk past almost every day. I will be amazed if it is completed while we are here, it looks like it has been there forever. Yesterday we actually noticed that the dirt road that the cement trucks take to work on the expressway had a small, concrete pool surrounded by sprinklers in it, Alex of course wanted to go play in it. I couldn't figure out
what the heck is was for, then I realized on the way back that it was to clean the truck's tires off before they enter back onto the paved road.

So, we go to the vending machine, get a drink, go to the train station and wait.

And we wait some more, and then the song starts and we know there will be a train. Alex freaks out, starts jumping up and down, yelling that the train is coming.
Then the train comes, if it is a fast train, it doesn't stop. If it is a local train, it does. Fast is better.

Sometimes we are there an hour, Alex wants to stay all day. I usually have to bribe him to leave. One day we were leaving to go do this and I ran into my neighbor. When she asked where I was going, I was kind of embarassed to try to explain with her that we were only going down to the train station to watch the trains. She said that her son liked the trains too, they actually have a huge train set they invited us over to play with. But since then I have realized it is not only the local foreigners (aka-us) with time to kill that do this. It is what all the Japanese moms do. Every day they are down there with their toddlers and babies to watch the trains, too. Last week, we went to the train station to actually take the train downtown, and I ran into my neighbor with her son and her daughter. It was her daughters holiday off from school, and this is what they were doing.

Alex is, as usual, by far the most enthusiastic when it comes to showing his excitement. None of the other kids yell and jump quite like he does, or really at all. Maybe they come to watch him.

kyoto and graveyards

This last weekend I met Lindsay in Kyoto while, for the first time, I realize, leaving Alex and Nate home alone. Before coming to Japan I had always had this notion of Kyoto being this quaint place where everything was traditional, beautiful and full of history. While I see why it is such a popular tourist destination for the Japanese, so much of it is actually a concrete jungle of sprawl and modern ugliness that I wonder what it is that the Japanese value so much. If they valued the traditional buildings and history, it seems that they would have tried to save some of it, rather than tearing everything down and rebuilding McDonalds and pachinko parlors everywhere.
Anyway, it was a fun time, and we did see some amazing sites, such as the Kinkakuji temple (the golden pavillion). The top 2 stories and top inside room are covered completley with gold leaf, it is truly amazing, if only they would let you see the inside! They also had a nice selection of key chains and cell phone charms. We went to Kiyomizo-dera, a buddhist temple which had the most beautiful and ornate lanterns and brightly-colored floral designs on the builidngs, and much more than I cannot even start to describe. We also went to Arashiyama. There was a walk through a bamboo forest and once we got away from most of the tourists (it was a 3 day weekend here, there were so many tourists everywhere, you could hardly walk down the streets) it was so peaceful and pleasant, walking through small streets with old farmhouses and groves of trees, it was one of the nicer times I have had here. The main tourist attraction here is the bridge, although we weren't that impressed--too much traffic. Our walk ended at another temple which had 8000 primitive buddhas that had been collected from around the countryside where lower class people had been buried. We also did a ton of shopping and had a lot of fun eating and I hope Lindsay didn't get sick of me dragging her into every souvenir shop in search of the perfect silk purse, which was never found!
Alex and Nate apparently explored some rather infrequently visited graveyards, saw some very large spiders and took some eerie photos. Alex is still too young to be wary of what situations his father is getting him into. Now we are home, resting, have caught colds and are back to normal.
kind of.