Our First Golden Week

Just a quick update as to what we've been up to.  Last week (April 29-May 6) was "Golden Week" here in Japan.  To be honest, I am not sure why it's called Golden Week and in fact, neither the "golden" nor the "week" parts make sense to me.  Monday was a holiday, then the kids had school and Kevin had work on Tuesday and Wednesday, and then Thursday and Friday were holidays.  Whaaaaat?  Why would you have a "golden week" that includes going to school and work on Tuesday and Wednesday?  Then again, no one asked me and I'm just a visitor here.  I'm sure there's a good reason for it and one day, I just might be smart enough to figure it out.  I wouldn't recommend holding your breath until then, however.

That said, we had a great "golden-three-days-plus-2-weekends."  Word on the Japanese street was that traveling during this week was an all-around bad idea because of high prices, horrible traffic, crowded trains, etc.  We had heard multiple stories of friends (Japanese friends, no less) who sat in a traffic jam for 4 hours to go 20 km.  So, we listened to that wisdom and stayed home here in Tokyo.

But, we lived life to the fullest and had several fun adventures.

Top Five Things We Did During Golden Week:

1.  Tokyo Giants Game

Great fun!  Ryan conked out for the first few innings (when the boy wants to sleep, he will sleep - it's the Narimatsu in him), and Ethan cheered non-stop for the whole game.  He started by using an empty potato chip box since that's all he had until Kevin and I relented and got them both noisemaker bats.

Giants beat the Hiroshima Carp 4-3 and we had hot dogs with seaweed (yep, you read that correctly - ballpark food Japanese style). Can't beat that for a good time.

The joy of noisemakers

At the top of the 8th inning, Kevin and I wondered if we should leave early so as to avoid the throngs of people and long lines to exit and get on the train.  But no one else was leaving.  Hmmm - when in Rome and all that.  Plus it's Golden Week, right?  And maybe something super exciting happens right after the game and we're the only ones who don't know about it.  So we stayed.  Nothing super exciting happened, unless you are as amazed as we are that the 45,000 people in the Tokyo Dome exited quickly and efficiently THROUGH REVOLVING DOORS in about 10 seconds flat.  OK, maybe not 10 seconds, but pretty darn fast.  Kevin and I were floored.  This would have been utter chaos in the US.


2.  Haneda airport to watch the planes land and the ships come into port

Fun way to spend an afternoon - and free!  To be honest, I was a little hung over from a girls night out, so I was not able to enjoy it to the fullest.  But the kids had a good time and that's the important thing.  We also visited Kevin's office for the first time and the kids loooved watching the shinkansen from the window of his office.  Added bonus was riding the monorail home...

Monorail ... aka ... roller coaster ride!  Wheeee....

3.  Fun with Friends

We invited 2 friends from Ethan's school over for "Movie Night" and had our first Japanese pizza delivery.  The pizza was yummy though not cheap ($60 for basically 2 small pizzas - they call them large size, but in American terms, they were small, as in 8-10 slices).  The kids had fun and were not at all happy when their friends had to go home.

Watching Alvin and the Chipmunks - Chipwrecked...

We also had a potluck picnic in the park with friends from Ryan's yochien.  I will be exchanging English lessons for Japanese cooking lessons with the grandmother of one of Ryan's fellow yochien students so it was good to meet her.  And it turns out that she and her husband were host families for the exact same exchange student program that Kevin was a part of 15 years ago.  Small world.

4.  Cereal for Breakfast and Double Ice Cream Cones (but not for breakfast)

May 5 was Children's Day in Japan.  From what we can tell, that means that you see fish flags flying, but we didn't observe any other significant components of Children's Day.  We did learn from a little girl in Ethan's class that they didn't do anything to celebrate it because "there are no boys in our house."  There is a Girls' Day on March 3, so it seems that Children's Day is really more Boys' Day.

Sooo, while others around the world were celebrating the 5th of May with Corona or margaritas, we were excited to eat cereal for breakfast.  That's a luxury for us now; it's the little things in life.  And we had ice cream cones to celebrate Children's Day.  Ethan was thrilled to point out that this was "the first time in my life that I had a DOUBLE ice cream cone.  I like Children's Day."

5.  We got a dog!

OK, only temporarily, but still.  We became a puppy foster family for a 7 month old Shiba inu named Mastumoto.  He belongs to one of our first friends here, Chika and we took care of him for a week while she was in the hospital having a beautiful baby girl.  He went home yesterday...

Chika, the kids, and Matsu a few weeks ago at the park...

He's a cute little guy, but he gave us quite a scare when he bolted out the door the first day we had him.  It was horrible.  As I opened the door to go meet a prospective student, there were huge crashes of thunder and bolts of lightning.  Matsumoto darted out and I couldn't stop him.  He took off.  It was pouring down rain, there was lightning and thunder and that little rascal was fast!  Turns out that's exactly when a tornado was happening just north of Tokyo, but of course, we didn't know it at the time.  We were running all over the neighborhood, we were searching on bikes, we were calling his name.  I was crying, just sick with worry that I would have to call Chika and Rocco and tell them that we'd lost their firstborn dog.  The neighbors were helping us look, we were asking everyone we saw.  Kevin was riding all over the neighborhood.  We were frantic!

Matsumoto's storytime

But, there is a happy ending!  Quite far from our house, some people had seen him running, blocked his path, nabbed him, and tied him up.   Kevin happened to ride by and see them and brought him home safe and sound.  Thank Buddha and all that!

Matsumoto was actually found at the house/garden shop of an older couple where we had stopped several times to buy plants for our garden.  So, the next day, Matsumoto and the kids and I went back to their house to thank them with some Ghirardelli chocolates (and we bought some more plants for the garden, for good measure).

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Kid Quote of the Day:

One day last week, Ethan asked me to read to him a Grimm's Fairy Tale, The Hare and the Hedgehog. It's from a book given to me by my grandmother so it's not an updated version of the fairy tales. It was about a husband and wife hedgehog who, by working as a team, tricked the hare into thinking that he had lost a race.  The story ended with 2 morals, and I quote.  
"1. Never make fun of anyone about a condition they can do nothing about, and 
2.  Marry someone like yourself."

Ethan:  Well, that's not true.  You and Daddy are different.  Daddy is Japanese and you're African.

Me:  I'm African?

Ethan:  Well, you like to go to Africa a lot and you're kind of different.

Me: Ummm, ok.