obon, anyone?

there is a holiday in august that lasts for about 3 or 4 days called obon (pronounced like "oh bone"). what i was told is that its a time when the spirits of departed ancestors return home. people spend time with their family and visit cemetaries. and, some people travel. many of the teachers at my school were planning a trip to tokyo for obon, but since i had recently arrived, i didn't feel that i could spend the money on such a trip. my roommate and i decided to take a trip to osaka instead. osaka is closer and we figured it would be a cheaper trip. we took a train to takamatsu, which took about and hour and a half. then we caught a bus that took us on a 3 hour trip to osaka.

we went through many tunnels on our trip. this was a short one...you can actually see the end before you go in. many of them were long and curved so it was a little scary. (the yellow sign under the tv says something about seat belts...hooray for japanese classes!!)


at one of the rest stops, we saw some funny engrish. the vending area sold "drinks and foods" and you cold get some "casual frozen foods" from a machine as well. i didn't see any formal frozen foods....hmm



we saw some beautiful scenery on the trip. it was a gorgeous day, albeit a very warm day.



we crossed many architecturally interesting bridges on our journey, as well. some of them were quite strange looking. i wasn't able to get good shots of all of them, but i have included a couple.


a shot of osaka (i think) as we were crossing one of the bridges.

one of my favorite things in osaka was the aquarium....kaiyukan, as it is called. we were smart and got our tickets at the subway station. as a result, we didn't have to wait outside in the line for hours. because it was obon, and summer, it was very crowded. i hate being crammed into crowds of sweaty people, and if i didn't love marine life so much, i probably would have skipped it altogether. i am glad we went. i recommend it to anyone who visits osaka.

the mascots of kaiyukan are the 2 whale sharks there. they are beautiful and enormous! i got this sweet shot by pure luck as it was very difficult to fight through the crowd to even get up to the glass.

this is a cool diagram that was on the wall to give you an idea of the size of the whale shark. it makes the great white (the 2nd largest on the chart) look quite small and makes man(swimming near the bottom) look tiny!

i hate being photographed, so this is one of the few times i will appear on the blog. i stopped to pose with this blue eyed fish i found who was not nearly as popular as the whale shark who stole the show.
this is a video of some cute little jellies we saw. i kept thinking of finding nemo!


more to come from obon....

better late than never

so, i decided before i moved to japan that i would start a blog as soon as i got here, and i have almost completed 3 months. what can i say? i believe in putting things off as long as possible. actually, i didn't have a camera when i first arrived and was afraid that without photos, my blog would be a huge failure. now i have a camera and i have done a bit of traveling around japan and even spent a few days in korea, so i wanted to post about them and get some pictures up so family and friends could see what i have been experiencing.

i live in kanonji, in the kagawa prefecture, on the island of shikoku. kanonji is a small town with very little to see or do. but it has its charms. everything shuts down at about 8:00 pm. i have a bike i use to get around town and the train station is just a 2 minute walk from my building. the school where i work is just a 4 or 5 minute walk. my apartment is a traditional japanese apartment... i will have to take pictures and post them here.


here are a couple of shots from my balcony at sunset. the lighting at sunset can make anything pretty, i think. not that kanonji is ugly, but it isn't the most beautiful part of japan.

i love the tile rooftops in japan. they have such a traditional feel to them. most are slate gray, but this blue one by our building is very pretty. it reminds me of the ocean.


2 days a week i work in a city called marugame. its 51 minutes away in train and the train passes this one spot where the tracks come right up to the edge of the water. i love the small islands and mountains in the distance. there is a part of one of the highways that runs along the ocean like this and on a very clear day you can see hiroshima on the main island. pretty cool!

i hope i will be able to keep up with this blogging thing. i have a bad track record....i still haven't finished my mission scrapbook, which i didn't even start until 2 years after my mission. and i won't even mention how long it has been since i finished my mission!