Hong Kong Highlights

I'm not even going to try and put these photos in order... it was hard enough choosing only a few to put on the blog! I would have to say that we had an absolutely wonderful time in Hong Kong. As a city it has a lot to offer, but the fact that we were staying with friends who actually live there made it so much better. We usually spent about half the day going somewhere and the other half at their apartment where the kids played cards, went swimming, made forts etc. and where I had a great time talking and talking with Birgit and Paul. It was hard to believe that we hadn't seen each other since they left Japan 5 years ago!
We went to many markets - flower, bird, goldfish, souvenir and local food markets (see previous post!), used many kinds of transport - airplane, taxi, subway, double-decker bus, minibus, ferry, ate many kinds of food - Aussie beef, Chinese takeaways, Korean bibinba, German traditional food, dragonfruit etc. etc. The children swam at the beach and the pool. They discovered a new sport - waveboarding and bought boards which they are now using here every day. We had a lovely day at Hong Kong park seeing birds and then the local maids on their day off entertaining themselves all over the city.
There were many other things we did, but if I don't post a brief summary now I know I will never get around to making a more detailed one.... A wonderful holiday with wonderful friends!
Unfortunately it is back to normal life now with Tom snoring on the sofa and work every day.

Breakfast anyone?

One of the major bonuses of staying with a "local" person is always the trips to the very local markets. We had a barbeque last night, but my suggestions of bringing home a few of these beauties to cook were quickly rejected - even though the skinning of them was all part of the purchase price! Sorry, I can't get the photo to turn around.

Unfortunately life in paradise ends tomorrow when we head back home...

Hello from Hong Kong

Just a very brief post to show you the view from our private terrace on the 62nd floor of our friend's "apartment" in Hong Kong. We have been sitting up there for dinner and then till late chatting... a wonderful way to finish each day. All I can say is that coming from a tiny town in Japan to a very compact city of 8 million is a bit of a shock to the children (and me.... ) but we have an absolutely fabulous guide and it is a wonderful feeling to be completely guided for a change rather than guiding people (not that I don't like that, but...). I'll write more when we get back, but for now I think this is about all I can do on this German keyboard. I know understand the frustrations of those coming to our house and using our Japanese keyboard! 2 and a half more days left of holidays.... always too short!

It's STILL the school holidays

I always think that if teachers are serious about asking for pay rises and want support from the parents then they should do their pay negotiations as soon as the summer holidays finish - or even a week or so before the holidays finish. I'm sure that a large number of parents would then be more than willing to pay the teachers anything they ask for! In other words, it's been a long summer holiday and there is still one week to go!
Today I decided that I really should do something a little more with the children than just let them run wild all day every day which leads to boredom, which leads to fighting, which leads to screaming on my part, which leads to a generally unhappy family. So we ended up inviting ALL the girls in my daughter's class to come and play for the afternoon. Actually originally we were only going to invite two of the girls, but when there are only a total of 5 girls in the class and one of them is my daughter it gets a bit tricky to invite some and not others.... anyway, unfortunately (??) one was busy and another one got sick at the last minute so we only had two extra children for the afternoon and it was a lot of fun. The neighbour had kindly donated his long piece of bamboo for the children to do noodle catching with - well some noodle catching followed by some watermelon, tinned fruit and then jelly catching!
Next we made some cupcakes (they wanted to take them to the sick girl) and headed to the free river pool..... only to discover that there was no water in it! So we headed to the local B&G pool which is only 100 yen to get in and the kids had a great time swimming for an hour and a half. I thought it might be nice to watch them swim, but the pool was a semi-indoor one and the temperature inside was 46 degrees. So, I sat in front of a fan in a room close by and did crossword puzzles. Even the pool supervisors were in a completely separate air conditioned room where they assured me they were watching the children on monitors so I could just relax. It seems crazy to me that even that pool will close at the beginning of September... surely they could leave it open in the weekends at least for a bit longer! (for anyone who doesn't know ALL pools seem to close on August 31st in Japan - even though it is still over 30 degrees every day).
One last "recreation" program tomorrow then we are on a plane on Thursday to Hong Kong for 4 nights... I can't wait!

Another good reason to go to NZ next summer....

I know I write about the same things every year, but this is Japan and things happen in exactly the same way every year! Yesterday was the annual "weeding" of the school grounds. Despite the 7am start it was still too hot to cope with doing too much and yet another reminder that the school should plant grass rather than go through the pointless process of trying to pull out all the weeds that grow in the hard, dusty, horrible playing ground. Of course if everyone just got on with the weeding rather than sitting in the shade gossiping things would also go quicker, but I won't get into that here!
In chicken news - the old chickens and new chickens spend all day together in relative harmony - pretty much staying out of each other's way but not fighting (unlike my children....). You may remember that we have a lovely chicken house that is predator safe and big enough for all the chickens to roost at night, but the new chickens are still a little weary of this (mainly because the big ones keep trying to peck them - similar to my children picking fights with each other....) and so they find all kinds of places in their run to roost for the night. I have left them out a few times, but then I can never sleep because I keep envisaging them being mauled by wild boars or more likely ferrets. So we usually spend a few minutes getting them down each night and getting them into bed. They protest for a bit, but then seem happy enough to be all together. Sometimes I really think that chickens and children might be related!

Flying things

I've decided that giving up on things is often the best way to actually make things happen. A good example is one of our new beehives that my husband bought which is supposed to lure the bees into it without any help from us. He put it in the "ideal" location with the special orchid above it in full flower to attract the bees. Nothing - not one bee went inside. So we put the hive beside the house until we could think of somewhere else to put it - perhaps next spring. Within a week it was buzzing with bees and three weeks later it is still buzzing! We are supposed to check it for bugs every week or so and today was the first time we lifted the lid to check that all is going well. If you click on the close up of the honey comb you can see that although the bees haven't started capping the comb there is a small supply of honey building up. Now we just have to hope that the queen starts laying some eggs to boost the population and the honey supply!
This morning I got up at 5am to try and make a start on reducing the number of weeds in the vegetable garden. By 8am it is already over 30 degrees so an early start is the only way I am likely to get anything done. It is also dark by 7:30pm so not much chance of late evening weeding either. Anyway, a relatively successful morning's work - one thing I rescued were some
butterfly flowers that my daughter and I planted from seed in spring. My work was rewarded by a beautiful butterfly coming to suck some nectar out while we were collecting some of the seeds. I just hope it is not one of the butterflies that will lay eggs that will hatch into the cabbage destroying caterpillars in spring... perhaps I shouldn't have bothered collecting so many seeds!

Logistical nightmare

This week was one of those logistical nightmares which leaves you trying to ignore everything till the last minute and then just hope that it all works out in the end - which fortunately it did! A month or so ago I enrolled the children for a swimming course - which meant they needed to be at the pool between 9:30 and 10:30 every morning this week. The pool is about a 20 minute drive from here so it is not really too much of a hassle getting them there everyday - unless all the kindergartens that you teach at decide that they are not taking a break from English classes in the summer holidays! It meant that I had to teach every morning - usually from around 10am till 11am. All the kindergartens are between a 20 minute and 40 minute drive from the swimming pool. I'm sure you can work out the logistical problems I had all week!

I admit that I really shelter my kids too much from the big bad world. I think it is probably a combination of coming from a country where it is illegal to leave a child at home alone until they are at least 14 years old and living in a country where there have been the odd (not a lot, but a few) case of a child being taken and murdered while walking home from school. I cringe when I see the 6 year old children walking home from the school pool at 12pm proudly showing the key to their house where they will go and stay until their parents get home from work at 6pm. I close my eyes when I see small kids weaving their way along the footpaths of busy streets on their bikes with no bike helmets. I am not trying to get into a conversation about parenting and what is best for children, but I do have a phobia of leaving my children alone in our house and letting them go places by themselves. They are now 9 and 8 years old so it isn't that they aren't capable - it is just that they never really have the chance. Living in the countryside you can't exactly just wander off to the shops etc. if you feel like it!

Anyway, if you have lost the plot of this blog entry, I don't blame you! I started out by talking about swimming lessons and then moved on to sheltering my children too much. It is all linked however by the fact that I used the fact that I couldn't be there to pick the children up from their lessons to help conquer my fear of letting them do things alone. Day one - no problem, I actually had nothing that day so didn't have to think too much. Day two - I knew I would be 30 minutes late so they were on shopping duty. They walked to the 100 yen shop for a look around then went to the supermarket where they bought 4 cartons of milk and some bread flour and then waited outside eating iceblocks until I arrived. Day three - I knew I would be about an hour late so they went and bought an iceblock (not that I was bribing them....), walked about 1km down the road in the scorching heat and went and got my son's haircut. Paid for the haircut and waited outside for me to come and get them. Day four - my kind friend took them home so I didn't have to worry! Day five - again I knew I would be about 40 minutes late so they asked if they could walk to the bookshop and wait there for me. Another successful outing where they managed to get an iceblock and drink on the way and then buy themselves some books too. I think my daughter's one is even one for studying! All in all what was going to be a nightmare in terms of organisation turned out to be a learning opportunity.

For all the family members who have been to swimming lately they both managed to pass the next level of their tests today - Emily completed her 25m butterfly in 28.12 seconds and Masaki did his 50m backstroke in 54.34 seconds - I don't think I could even swim that far anymore and I know I definitely couldn't get my arms out of the water to do butterfly!

Beating the drum

As a lot of you already know, when my daughter started school we made the decision to not go to the local school (about a 10 minute walk away), but go to the next closest school (about an 8 minute drive away). The decision was made purely on the fact that there were no other children starting school that year
and therefore she would have been in a class on her own. Most of the
time I still believe that we made the correct decision, but very occasionally I feel sad that we are not able to be involved more with the few children that actually live in our tiny hamlet. The main time is the annual bon-dancing where most of the community gets together to farewell the ancestors who have been back to visit. The children from the local school all play the drum, but our children have never been able to do so (only because they haven't been taught it). However, this year my husband has been working with a few others to help any children who want to learn the drumming each Saturday night and this year they both played the drums with the local children, talked with them and played with them for the first time. It was probably the first time they felt really involved in the community and they had a great night.
I personally get sick of dancing around in a circle after the first 10 minutes or so and was happy when the night was over! Mind you we did come home with 2 boxes of glad wrap, 2 drink bottles, 2 chilly-bins and about 15 sponges for washing the dishes so I guess I shouldn't complain too much!

Leaving it over to the pumpkins

Despite my wonderful wheat efforts (just for the record we only got about 3kg of unrefined wheat so we are not exactly self sufficient yet! Heather, I really have no idea what kind it is... tane no mori seeds!) the rest of my garden has been abandoned this year. A combination of lots of visitors, lots of work, lots of rain and lots of heat has meant I haven't been able to get into the garden for months and the result is a HUGE weed pile. I have decided to let the various kinds of pumpkins take it over for the summer and in the autumn get the weedeater and tractor employed and start all over again.... hopefully!
A lot of my pumpkins are butternut pumpkins and most of them are self seeded. The interesting thing about self seeding pumpkins is that they readily cross pollinate with other varieties and you end up getting some interesting shapes and textures. The last photo in this entry is a pumpkin which I think is a cross between a butternut pumpkin and a jack-be-little one that had already crossed with some kind of zucchini last year. It will be interesting to see what the flesh inside is like.......
As an aside, I'm not going to get into the squash vs pumpkin argument... they are all the same to me!

A long process

One of my dreams is to be as self sufficient as possible... within reason anyway! I make a lot of bread, cakes etc. and therefore one thing I would love to have is my own wheat to make my own flour. Today we finally moved one step closer to this dream... on a very small scale! At the end of November some of the junior high school students randomly planted some wheat for me and my children stood on it occasionally, I weeded it very occasionally and somehow it managed to grow big and strong. My mother helped me harvest it when she was here and it stayed drying in the tunnel house until today when we finally decided to do something with it. Unfortunately I only planted a small amount so it wasn't worth going to borrow my friend's machine to separate it all out and therefore the traditional style of beating it with a bottle and then trying to separate the husks from the actual wheat began. We did resort to throwing it through a separating machine at one stage, but basically it was all done by hand.

Many hours later and we finally had our first ever wheat. I think we have to dry it again one more time and then work out how to make it into actual flour.... or perhaps I'll just keep it all and use it for planting more for next year - when we will definitely be using a machine to harvest it!

Holiday homework

It is summer holidays here in Japan which means the battle is on every day to get my children to do their homework. My memories of New Zealand schooling is that when school was out for the summer holidays, school was really out and the pencil cases were put away till the start of the new term. Therefore I have a huge problem with the amount of homework my daughter has been given this year (she is 9 years old...) and feel like telling the teachers to stuff off and let the children play in the holidays, but at the same time she goes to a Japanese school and therefore has to do what is expected of her. Tonight she finally finished her big project. I can remember doing projects at primary school and actually enjoying them. I can also remember that we were given a basic theme and a basic overview of what was expected of us. Title page, contents page, introduction, habitat etc. etc. My favorite project was one about a toe-biter. The theme was rock pools (if I remember correctly).

My daughter came home with a big piece of white paper, no expectations from the teacher and was told to research something during the holidays, present it on the big piece of paper and hand it in on September 1st. I personally think it is a little difficult for children of this age to do this without a bit more direction, so I helped her to do some basic brainstorming and worked through how she might present it etc. She decided to do it on our solar electricity system and the sun etc. and in the end it was all her own work and she is very proud of actually getting it done with some time to spare. Now she only has about 15 pages of maths homework, 20 pages of kanji homework, 3 pages of diary and a whole book of experiments etc. to do before we leave for Hong Kong on the 26th.... it could be a painful few days!