Weekend round-up, redux

Another pretty decent weekend.

Started the weekend off nicely with a picnic in the park for lunch on Friday. I got carry-out from one of the yummiest places around, Paseo, and took it to Green Lake for a lazy afternoon at the park. Lunch was great, Green Lake was lovely, and it was so nice to sit outside and read my current book (an absolute must-read, by the way). Friday night I had dinner with my friend Amy on her forested balcony. Amy also helped me get going on double-pointed needles again (I mean, after Lisa showed me last month. I’ve heard it takes seven times of looking a foreign language word up in the dictionary before you truly learn it. So, extending the same principle, I’ve still got a ways to go . . . .). My goal is to knit my first ever sweater (the photo is the same pattern that I intend to knit, but in a different color. I found this on some random person's blog. My actual mileage my differ). This sweater will be for a friend’s baby who is due on October 20th. Ever realistic, my goal is actually to get the sweater done this calendar year.

Saturday I went kayaking with SYL and her novio, K2J (Is this getting boring? Are you bored? Look at the pictures! Well, except that there are no pictures of this portion of the weekend). We rented the kayaks over on the eastside and took them up the Mercer Slough. This was not amazingly scenic, although we did see tadpoles and turtles, not to mention the back of many an office park and the underside of several freeway overpasses, but it was great to be out on the water on such a beautiful day. I also picked A LOT of blackberries, since you could just kayak up to the bushes that hung out over the water. And those bushes were loaded with berries. As it turns out, there is actually a reason that those bushes have so many berries: it is not, um, easy to pick berries in while kayaking. In fact, it is a rather fine line between picking berries successfully and being punished for one’s berry-picking greed by either running the kayak (and yourself) straight into the thorns of the berry bushes or tipping the kayak over in an attempt to get that one super-plump, really ripe, absolutely delicious berry just beyond arm’s reach. After stuffing myself with berries, we kayaked back, drove home, cleaned up, and had a decent pizza (complete with pineapple!) at Piecora’s.

Sunday was another great day. Let me just say that I am so glad I have all these friends inviting me out places, since, without them, I would totally become the reclusive cat lady. With 37 cats. And I don’t even like cats. On that note, yes, Sunday . . . . I went over to Jen Em’s house to play with the best dog in the world (see proof below) and to garden a little.That is actually an official American Kennel Club stuffed duck.

I had a super-yummy breakfast, complete with rosemary potatoes with fresh rosemary from the garden, cooked by Jen Em’s boyfriend. Then we planted the new plants that Jen Em had bought. All I can say is that it sure is easy to plant plants when someone else digs the holes for you! Jen Em also sent me home with fresh basil from her garden. I think I might make a tomato mozzarella salad today with this.

Sunday afternoon I went hear the Yarn Harlot speak. This was definitely a new experience. Here are some things that won’t surprise you about this talk: nearly the entire audience was female; almost everyone was knitting while she waited, and about 80% of the audience kept knitting once the talk started; hand-made felted bags were VERY popular; and nearly everyone wanted to get her book signed and show her project (that, of course, she was wearing) to the author. Here are some things that surprised me: for some people, this was like a church-meeting-meets-coming-home-ceremony – people nodded their heads fervently and pumped their firsts in the air. I think I might have even heard an “amen” once or twice. I also heard a middle aged woman say, “I hate the weekends, because she never writes on her blog on the weekends.” Sister-friend, weekends are NOT for hating. You need to get a life. Your OWN life. There was a woman there with a large strange wooden contraption for unwinding thrift-store sweaters so she could re-use the yarn for new knitting projects. This is weird, but, whatever, you can own whatever kind of big thing you want, but do you gotta bring it out public?

Anyway, the talk was pretty fun. I definitely felt like the lamest and beginner-est knitter there. For example, my friend Amy is knitting the most beautiful lace shawl. Ever. I am not really knitting anything, just practicing on double-pointed needles so that I feel confident enough to begin my first sweater. Um, yeah. On the plus side, I am now in the possession of a dirty knitting joke. Just ask.

We, too, met the author and got our books signed.In Amy’s hand is one of many socks she is knitting. These are socks in the colors of the Cleveland Browns football team. It is possible that just because of these socks, the Cleveland Browns will now win the Super Bowl.

Mount Fuji & Hakone

So Jen Em and I went on a little two-day trip to Mount Fuji and Hakone. This trip was actually a guided tour, organized by JTB. The tours in this series are only for foreigners, and they are a really great deal. You can also use the tour to get the transport and hotel, but skip the guided part.

Anyway, we opted for the guide. We left Tokyo at 9am on Thursday and drove to Mount Fuji. It was actually clear and we saw the mountain! We even got to drive up as far as the road goes – it was very cold there!

After Mount Fuji and lunch, the tour headed for Hakone and Lake Ashi. We took a brief (and cold) boat ride and then a longer (and colder!) cable car ride to a mountain summit that overlooked the lake and had a beautiful shrine. If it had been clear, we would have been able to see Mt. Fuji, but it had clouded up in the afternoon.

The tour portion then ended when we were dropped at a hotel in Hakone. Hakone is a popular place for Japanese tourists; it is in the mountains, and it is a region especially known for hot springs. Our hotel was mostly filled with Japanese people, all of whom had known to make reservations for dinner at the hotel’s restaurant. Hakone is more a region than a town – the hotel stood alone nestled in the mountains, without very many nearby eating options (there was no strip with cheap food). So this was a little frustrating, since not only did we have to eat expensive hotel food, but at the first restaurant we went to we were told we would have to wait two hours before being allowed to do so. Eventually, at 6pm, several more hotel restaurants opened, and we found a buffet place where we could walk right in.

After digesting dinner, Jen Em and I hit the onsen. Onsen are hot pools that one soaks in naked – they are segregated by sex, and you bathe with soap before you enter. The onsen had both an indoor portion (which was too humid for us) and an outside portion (which was perfect and lovely, especially since we could see a few stars through the clouds). The overall mood was something like a feminized version of the stylized way that westerners know Turkish baths or maybe a mikveh without the religious baggage.

In the morning, Jen and I did something really pretty strange: we went to this very, very strange onsen water park. I am actually not sure that I can convey how weird the water park was, but I will try. This was essentially a water park marketed at adults, since all you really did was sit. You wore your bathing suit, and you were issued a tie-dyed orange cover-up and a white towel when you entered. Then, you basically went from theme bath soaking pool to theme bath soaking pool. Most of the baths were indoors, but not all. There were twenty pools and three waterslides in all, and we sat/slid in each one of them!

Our favorite soaking pools included:

Rose water (under the grape arbor, of course)

Undersea (complete with sand on the bottom)

“Greco-Roman-Turkish” (with mosaic walls and domed ceiling)

Dead Sea (with water imported from the Dead Sea)

Sake

Green Tea (a bit Alice in Wonderland-esque with the big teapot)

Coffee

And, Wine
This was not just any wine, but Beaujolais Nouveau. And, true to form, at 11am, the water park had a ceremony in which they poured wine into the hands of bathers in the wine pool. This was seriously weird. We didn’t really know what was happening, except that a tuxedoed wine steward showed up and then all the Japanese bathers [old ladies included] rushed to get in the wine pool. So, we followed. Then, we waited around for a little bit for it to become 11am. During this time, Jen Em and I had no idea what was going to happen. The wine was likely going to be opened, but we didn’t see any cups . . . and we weren’t sure that the “beverage baths” [as we started calling them] actually had the real beverage in them. But, then, lo and behold, the stewards opened the wine, and the bathers clamored to get it poured in their hands from the open bottles [much ran into the pool]. I tasted some, and let me tell you: it was bad, bad wine.

But you can’t beat the ambience!

Squirtle / Sheldon

With Mike gone, my big weekend accomplishment was finishing a baby gift for baby Zachary. You know, now that he's eight months old. But, voila, I present to you a knitted turtle:Although small, this was a big knitting project for me - I had to learn how to crochet to finish the darn [ha!] thing. Big props go to Jen Em who, with the patience befitting an elementary art teacher, taught me how to crochet.

I have several other projects forthcoming [in theory. certainly not with any alacrity]: a sweater-vest for my brother, some fancy socks for me [inspired by Dr. M's gift], and a baby present for baby Emma's new brother [who is expected to make an appearance in late May - can that family handle any more cute???].

We'll see about finishing all that before, oh, 2012.

In other weekend news, I went to the fancy Pacific Northwest nursery to help Jen Em shop for plants. Here are a few pictures:I really like the picture of the dog - although the background is a little busy. I'm considering making it my new internet avatar.

And then we went back to Jen Em's house and I got to kick it with the most wonderful [real] dog in the world.As a parting gift, here are some shots of the cherry blossoms on campus. I took this last week when the shone briefly. Now it's back to being rainy and cold.

Sunday

I had a pretty good Sunday. I started things off with a run with Meredith. We are training for the Seattle Half Marathon – and I just found out that the B-Hatch will be running with us as well. So that should be fun. Except, perhaps, the part where we have to run. Also, the part where we have to run up the hills.

After my run (and a shower, thank you very much), I headed over to the library book sale with my library book sale posse (Lisa, Jen Em, Owen [Jen Em’s boyfriend], and my new friend Elias). We were a big enough group that we could have beaten up (or at least boxed out) anyone who was reaching for books we thought were ours. And that might have been necessary, had we come on Friday night or on Saturday morning. See, this book sale is crazy. It’s the sale for all of Seattle’s public libraries. It happens twice a year in this big, empty airplane hangar.On Friday and Saturday, the line to get in snakes around the building and people camp out with barbeques and the like. We in Seattle take our books seriously. But on Sunday morning the scene was considerably more mellow. The booksale was also a little picked over. But, the upside was that Sunday is half-price day, so I managed to get fifteen books for $6.25. Can’t beat that! And I did get some books that are definitely exciting.

To regain our strength after the booksale, we went out for Thai food. Though the place was a bit noisy, the food can’t be beat. And I hadn’t seen a set-up like this since we were in Thailand.Okay, truth be told, at this point I came home and took a little nap.

But, when I awakened, I headed off to my knitting group. We met at the cutest little teahouse on Queen Anne hill – and I had the yummiest cinnamon tea there. As for the knitting, my baby sweater is coming along. Okay, just kidding, my baby sweater is not coming along at all. I did knit one gauge swatch from which I learned that I need to adjust things if I want the sweater to be large enough to fit an actual baby (the minimum requirement for baby sweaters, I hear). So I’ve stalled out in the knitting department for the moment. But my friend Amy continues knitting her lace shawl like mad.In other news, fall is definitely here. It’s turned a bit rainy and cold, and the tree outside our living room window is changing.Tonight I am heading to the airport to pick my mother up. She’ll be up here for about a week. The highlight of her visit will be our trip to Victoria. I’m excited about going to Victoria, having tea at the Empress, seeing Butchart Gardens, etc. I am less excited about riding the boat for 3 hours to get there. Oh well.

The Animals

Finally on my way to feeling better, I returned to art volunteering this week.

This was our week to paint the clay animals that Jen Em had made with the students. In preparation for this (and following the amazing lesson plans left for me by Jen Em), two weeks ago we all did a lesson on color. We made color wheels, and talked about what happens when you mix colors together.

So, this week, we began with a review of color mixing, a discussion about how to make colors lighter and darker, talked about how to paint our animals so they look like the animals we intended them to, and had a review about the rules associated with painting with acrylic (permanent) paints.

The animals turned out wonderfully!

On Toilet Honda

Well, I promised that I would post my version of the story, but I really don’t want to think about it anymore. Actually, that’s not true, I think about it a lot, so I guess this doesn’t really make that big a difference….
[I'm sorry this is so long. You don't have to read it. Really]

So Jen Em and I went to the multi-purpose store to buy modeling clay for the art lesson at the international school. This was no easy task, since when you can’t read the packages, modeling clay and clay that has to bake in a kiln look suspiciously similar. I tried taking pictures with my cellphone of packages of clay that I thought were modeling clay and sending these pictures to Mike at the university on his cellphone (so he could tell me what the labels said), but the camera/screen resolution wasn’t quite good enough for that.

So finally I had to flag down a store employee and hand her the cellphone and have her listen while Mike explained what I needed. Talk about humiliating. But she was very nice, and totally helped me out – despite the fact that it is pretty weird to have someone hand you a cellphone while saying “My husband has a question for you.”

Anyway, so that hurdle over with, we returned to the car in the parking lot. In Japan, almost everyone (that is, all the Japanese) backs into parking spaces. This is not the law, just convention. Once I found out it wasn’t the law, though, I quickly started pulling into parking spaces the “normal” way. This mean that my (driver’s side) door opens into the driver’s side door of a backed-in Japanese parker.

So as we are getting into the car (school is about 20 minutes away, and the lesson begins in 40 minutes, but we had a little prep to do), this guy sitting in the next car over starts making all these faces and gestures, indicating that my door had bumped his car door. I really, really don’t think I did. But, even if I did, there was no mark whatsoever.

So I make the apology nod, and start to back our car up. At which point this guy lurches his car forward as if to hit us. So, Jen is like, “Okay. We have to stop.” So I stop the car in the middle of the parking lot aisle, get out, and go to apologize.

My vocabulary is really limited, so all I can say is “Excuse me, I’m sorry. I don’t understand” I can’t say, “Buzz off, loser, your car looks fine, there’s no mark, so what are you so upset about anyway?” The guy is yelling at me, angrily, and I understand nothing. Meanwhile, the clock is ticking, and we have to get to school.

So I go and get my cellphone and call Mike and explain that this guy thinks my door hit his car, but it didn’t, there’s no mark, and I have to go to school. Mike first tells me just to drive away, but I tell him that when we tried that, the guy tried to hit us with his car. So then Mike says, “let me talk to him.” I go back and implore the guy to take the phone, proffering it while saying “husband, husband.” The guy is screaming at me to get me husband to come there—I understand that much, but keep acting like I don’t understand that, because, really, the university is like 10 miles away and all Mike has is his bike. And, oh, yeah, I am supposed to start teaching in 30 minutes.

Several passersby noticed this, but none stopped [and I really think, when I think back on this, that it is the failure of others to come to my aid that disturbs me more than one crazy person]. I asked one man if he spoke English, but the driver of the other car just told him to leave, that things were okay (like, they were so obviously not okay), and the man just left. How could he have just left?

Finally the guy takes the phone, screams at Mike, hangs up the phone, and won’t give it back. So I figure that two can play this game, and I get the camera from my purse and start taking pictures of the alleged damaged door.
This enrages the guy even more. Meanwhile, the phone keeps ringing as Mike is trying to call back, but the guy won’t answer it and is alternately hiding it in his bag and making threatening motions as if he will break it.

At this point, I really start to lose it and start to cry.

So Jen gets out of the car, hauls on over to the guy, and uses her best angry-teacher voice and is like, “Give her back her phone. NOW.” And the guy keeps making the breaking motion (and the phone is still ringing with Mike on the other end). Then the guy makes it understood that it will cost us about ten dollars to get the phone back. He also keeps repeating the word “police.”

Finally, Jen is like, “That’s right. Police.” So she sends me to go get the police. I find a young-ish woman getting out of her car nearby and I ask her if she speaks English. She does, a little. But, of course, I am no state to make my problem comprehensible to her, since I am all shaken up and crying. So finally I just ask her where the nearest policebox is.

Just as she starts to tell me, I see that Jen has my phone back (minus the charm, which he ripped off it) and the guy is peeling out of the parking lot. Only afterwards do I learn that this is after he shoved her and threatened to hit her with his car.

So we tell Mike we are okay. We talk about calling the police, but we only have a part of his license plate, and, moreover, what would we tell the police anyway? So we get in our car and drive to the school, all the while watching through the rearview mirror for him. We arrive at school in time to do some prep, and Jen teaches a fantastic lesson.

***
I am honestly not sure what happened. Did we walk into a scam (Did he pick me because I had parked the car anomalously? Does it mean something that he was in the car when we arrived? That he kept gesturing me to pull the car back into the parking space, thus to stop drawing attention to myself?) or was he just a really angry person? Or both? Not sure.

Also, I guess I worry that this doesn’t seem as scary in the re-telling as it was in the experiencing. And, thus, that I look like a lame foreigner. Oh well. It was scary. I felt so helpless and unfairly targeted (since there really was no mark on his car).

The ultimate result of this is that I feel way less safe here than I used to. I am acutely aware of how much I cannot say or make understood. I also fear that I’ll turn some corner here in Tsukuba and just see him there. So I don’t love going out of the house alone, and I’ve totally given up driving alone.

The last is a real bummer for Mike, since I was just starting to drive alone, and had just learned how to go to the airport by myself to retrieve guests (a four-hour round-trip). I feel guilty that I am now less independent, that I will no longer do things that could allow Mike more time to focus on his research. But, at the same time, I am really worried that this could happen again. I mean, I know that it probably won’t, but at the same time, I’d rather not trust probabilities.

And I can accept that this guy was crazy—there are crazy people everywhere—but I have more trouble with the fact that things were obviously wrong, and people just walked by and left me to work it out with the crazy person all by myself. No one really stopped to help me at all. I think what I struggle with is why/how all those people walking by could just keep walking. This makes me feel like I can’t really trust any strangers to help me out the next time I am lost or confused. Which, is, well, constantly here.

San Diego

While Mike was in Japan, Natalie and I went to visit my family in San Diego. This was my first trip alone with Natalie. She did really well on the way over, sleeping nearly the whole way. The flight back to Texas was a little more challenging since the flight was diverted to El Paso because of a medical emergency on board. The flight eventually took off again, but the unscheduled stop made the journey a little more challenging.

But we're back in Texas now, happily reunited with Mike. And now that Mike is playing with Natalie, I can share some San Diego highlights.

The best thing about being in San Diego was introducing Natalie to my grandmother.Of course, Natalie also met other new people. My friend Jen Em came down from Seattle for a short visit.We took advantage of Jen's visit to do some touristy things. First, we attended the holiday lights parade downtown - we "attended" in that we went to a nice restaurant on the water and ate lobster as the decorated boats sailed by.Later during Jen's visit, we continued our holiday lights experience with a trip to the San Diego Botanical Garden to see their holiday lights. This was a totally fun event, complete with a bonfire for roasting marshmallows and a Celtic band singing holiday songs in Spanish.Before we hit the holiday lights, we were joined by some good friends at my new favorite San Diego restaurant, Kaito Sushi. (I must confess to eating there again during my visit since SYL and I also went there to celebrate her birthday)Jen and I also took Natalie to the aquarium. Natalie also got to meet our good family friends:(for some dumb reason, I didn't get pictures of everyone, so we'll have to let the food pictures stand in for the missing folks!)Here's Natalie with SYL:And here's Natalie with her first kitty cat:She wasn't that interested in the cat, but later in the trip she saw a dog and laughed and laughed. A girl after her mother's heart!

We also did some holiday cooking. Here's uncle Eric with some plum pudding:And here are some cookies I baked:(not pictured: the delicious chocolate cake made mostly by Eric on Christmas Eve)

In typical San Diego fashion, we walked on the beach a lot, including one night with a lovely sunset.Also, after many years of talk and just under one year of knitting, I finally finished Eric's sweater vest:Here are just some random cute pictures from the visit:Okay, this post is already long enough, so I'm going to stop now. Look for posts coming soon about our trip to San Francisco as well as Natalie's five-months-old post.

Here's the whole San Diego album (available here):