Spring Break

The first few days being back in Japan have been different from what I imagined.

Because it's spring break, a lot of people are away, either travelling, visiting their home countries or, in the case of the Japanese people, their home towns. Two good friends are in Korea and a few more have been while I was in England; one is back in America; a few more are back in Osaka or their respective home towns. So it's quiet around here.

Still, I got to do the only travelling I've done since I've been here: I was invited to go on a day trip to Shikoku, the southern island, with a couple of Japanese friends and one of the Americans, which was fantastic. I didn't know this, but Shikoku is famous for soba (thick wheat noodles), so we ate half our lunch at one of the soba places and the other half at another one. This is down the road from the first:

The Japanese countryside is stunning, isn't it? There were miles of fields with houses just scattered seemingly randomly across them; traditional houses mixed with newer traditional-style ones and newer western-style ones. Outside you could see people working tiny little garden-fields, mostly elderly - it's only when you get outside the university town that you can really see how unbalanced the population is.

Between lunches, we went to a famous beauty spot - a traditional park originally built for one of the Tokugawa period prefecture rulers, the Daimyo. It really was beautiful:

And I got to try dango - it's a traditional Japanese sweet which I saw in a Japanese cartoon once and always wanted to try. I'm not sure what it's made of, but it's very very chewy and comes in three balls on a stick. It was nicer than I expected, actually.

I think I'll remember that day as one of the best - although hopefully there will be ones to rival it in the future.