Japan - The next few days

Friday - New Year's Day. (I finally found the apostrophe, which is shift-7 for some reason). Today was pretty low key for a New Year's Day because Katsu's mom is sick. Usually she throws big parties with all the missionaries and we eat all the traditional New Year food and play games and have to give our resolutions. Anyways, again, she had dialysis in the morning. Katsu's aunt was here, busy preparing all of the New Year food.

So, in the morning, Andrew watched lots of Japanese TV (which he has been doing most days here, since we have had a really hard time finding a park, there is no green space or places for kids to run around, and we obviously didn't bring him enough toys) and we also took the boys on a walk to the local shrine. We threw in a couple tiny coins and clapped in front of the (altar?). The shrine is very small, just right next to the train station, but they were playing some traditional music and there were some other families there. Other than that, we just walked around some.

Later that afternoon, after Katsu's mom got home from the hospital, we got everything together (meaning, Katsu's mom, aunt, and sister ... we are not particularly helpful while trying to corral the two kids), and had the dinner. Traditional New Year's foods are all symbolic, either in their color or their meaning. They don't really taste good, but you make tons of them every new year and then eat them for the next several days. There is a lot of weird vegetables and strange fish product - fish eggs, fish cakes, etc. This year, it seemed like there was more meat than usual and everything I had actually tasted pretty good - but later, Katsu told me that is just because he picked the good parts for me. Of course, Andrew was not really interested in eating any of it. Seth was eating some baby food, but was mostly just really fussy, so we took turns holding him and eating the food. I hate when Katsu is attending to the boys and I am with the family because I feel completely clueless. Not understanding the language makes me feel like a little kid watching a conversation going on that I have no idea what it is about.

Anyways, after the dinner, Katsu's mom was tired and had to rest, but the rest of us headed off to go to the big shrine that is about a 30ish minute walk away. The walk was nice, we walked on an elevated path around the Super Arena, and then the path from the first set of red tori to the shrine was most of the rest of the walk. The shrine is supposedly 2000 years old and from the tori to the shrine itself is a long walk - probably at least 20 minutes. Once you get close to the shrine, there are booths surrounding both sides of the walkway selling lots of Japanese-carnival type food, like takoyaki (octupus in a pancake like batter), apples dipped in a hard-candy solution, okinomiyaki (sort of like pancakes but with cabbage), and lots of fish and meat. I especially like choco-banana, or bananas dipped in chocolate (Okay, once again, it started typing all in japanese and took me like 10 minutes to figure out how to turn it back into Roman script ... argh), and crepes, both of which I had. I guess I misunderstood, because after we all got our fill of food, we headed home and didn't actually go to the shrine at all. I was pretty disappointed, but as the boys were cold and tired, it was better to go home anyways.

Well, Seth is yawning. Maybe he will go back to sleep. He refuses to adjust to the last couple hours of time here and wakes up around 3 am every morning. I am hating this trip.