A hot walk

This past week was a busy one. I have quite a bit of homework from my regular classes now and next week we finally start kanji classes and my extra online classes. I had my first private lesson on Friday. I will have two a week with two different teachers. It was fun. Matsuyama Sensei is married with three children ages 21, 19 and 17. We talked about why I wanted to study Japanese, our birthdays, ages and where and when I studied Japanese before. I had fun trying to tell her about my daughters. I learned the words for married and engaged! The private lessons are to help with conversation and to reinforce the lessons we are doing in the book, Mina no nihon go, which means Everyone’s Japanese.

Having said all that, I still had time to go exploring this weekend with a couple of students I’ve met who are from Hong Kong. Originally Catherine and I had planned to just go to the near-by Minami Park on bikes, but when I arrived at her residence, (she lives in the women-only residence run by the charming couple who had me to a soba dinner a week or so ago), I found that another student was joining us and the plan had changed. Winnie wanted to get out into the country and had read about a river where people fish from a weir and had worked out how to get there, or so she thought. The new plan involved taking two trains, and a bus to get to the spot on a river in the suburbs (I use that word loosely), quite a distance from the center of town but still in Okazaki city limits. Just getting on the right train is challenging for me so I was glad to be going with someone. I look at the train schedule and have trouble identifying where I am, let along where I want to go, but the other two speak Chinese and recognize the kanji pretty well, even if they don’t know how it is pronounced in Japanese. It was another scorching hot day and it was about noon when we got going. The trains came pretty quickly and we switched without trouble, but arriving where we were to get the bus, we discovered that the one that went to our destination would not be coming again for another couple of hours!

What to do??? We took a little walk in the area around the station but didn’t find even a convenience store. We settle for a snack from the stand in the station and where trying to stay cool when a bus showed up at the stop. It was an hour earlier, but our hopes were raised that we had misread the schedule. However, on talking with the bus driver as best as we could, we learned that he did not go to our destination on this trip, but stopped about 5 or 6 stops before it, on the next round he would go all the way to the end of the line. We decided to take this bus anyway, rather than wait in the station with nothing to do for another hour. Soon we were driving past rice fields and vegetable gardens. Mountains appeared and a stream could be seen. It was fun to be out in the country again, seeing such rural life so close to the big city, but before we knew it the bus had come to the end of its line. The driver, who was very nice and tried to be so helpful, told us we could wait, still about an hour, or we could start walking, thought it was a bit hot. We opted for walking since he had said (or at least we thought he did) that is was maybe 20 or 30 minutes to our destination on foot. We walked and walked and passed several bus stops but were still not there.

After 45 minutes in the blazing sun, we came to another bus stop and gave up walking to wait for the bus. It was about at this time that we began wondering with we had made a BIG mistake. There was not a store or a gas station in sight and no way to cool off. Thank goodness I carry my umbrella with me always and use it in the sun like the Japanese do, or I would have been cooked to crisp. After ten minutes at the bus stop the same driver came by and picked us up! We sighed with relief as we sank into seats in the air-conditioned bus, but our destination was only about 10 minutes away by bus and soon we were looking at our hard earned goal. (On getting out the driver wouldn’t let us pay! He said he had only taken us a short way and we had paid a fair that would have taken us further before, had he been going further. I think he was just being kind to these hot and sweaty foreigners who clearly did not know what they were doing!) There was the Otogawa Weir. Was this really a must see? Where are the people? Where are the fish? What had looked like a lively, fun filled water activity was a low key, take the kids for a picnic and play in the water, try-to-catch-little-fish-with-your-hands kind of an event AND it was nearly closing time! We took off our shoes and cooled off, took a few pictures and it was time to catch the bus back or wait another 2 or 3 hours!

This was a bit of a lesson in figuring out how to get to places and the need to know more about the destination and the schedule of buses. This was clearly a place people with cars went to with their kids on weekends, and perhaps at the right time of year there are lots of fish and activity. All things we didn’t know. I was a bit disappointed with how much all the transportation had cost for so little reward, but it was an adventure into the unknown and that, in itself, is a worthwhile activity.

Today I studied in the morning and at noon headed out by myself on a more modest adventure. I had borrowed a bike and was going to find Minami Park. I knew roughly where it was, but finding the entrance was a bit more challenging and riding a bike, especially these Chinese bikes that everyone rides here, with squeaky handbrakes and heavy frames, was downright scary! I have to say I felt proud to get there and back without killing anyone or being run over! I only dared attempt it because on Sundays there aren’t a million school kids whizzing by on bikes, as there is during the week. A bike is definitely the way to go around here, though. It takes a quarter of the time it would walking and you can put stuff in the basket on front or on back. I took only main roads where there is a bike lane in the sidewalk. I’m going to get my one
soon!

The park had a big pond with, lots of turtles, fish and birds. There was an outdoor swimming pool and tennis courts. The “pu-ru” cost only 60 yen for adults and 40 for kids, that is about 60 and 40 cents. There was a mini amusement park for young kids mostly, but at night older ones might go. A big Ferris wheel was slowly spinning a hundred feet above the trees.

(Pictures above are: the long hot road to nowhere, a very hot Marsha and bus schedule, the Minami Park and bike) Ja mata.