Fun with Choom, Rehearsal, Swing Dancing and Friend-Making

 Monday October 3rd

I got to see Choom! We walked by the salon she get's her hair done at and saw another friend there getting her hair done, so we dropped in to say hi. What are the chances?? Also, one time I was randomly walking by there alone, and the hairdresser literally ran out and told me my hair was cool and he wanted to have me hair model sometime, and I was like OK, actually my friend is one of your regulars 😄 Anyway, Choom came to my place, helped me organize my disaster of a room a little more, and then we wandered around and did a mini photo shoot, and had a long chat about life while on the swings at at park. The kinmokusei were just past their peak of full bloom.

 Sunday October 10

This was quite an eventful, fun Sunday! Husband was in Osaka with his band, so I tried to have fun anyway. It started out with rehearsal for Midsummer, and I helped our new fairy learn her part in the songs, and we practiced the dances a bit. After that, we went for lunch and drinks at a nearby Izakaya with lots of fish. I was in a really good mood, and I was having so much fun I didn't want to go, even though I had a swing dance event from 3. 

Tomato hai

Table charge food. The fish is shishamo which I have gotten used to eating, even though it has a head and eyes

It just landed like this. Lucky, right?

I ended up leaving right on time to make it to swing dance!  I went to this monthly event before, recently. In fact, I think that this event, pre-covid, is where I met my best friend Mo! Anyway, I was a bit self conscious about smelling like izakaya, but since I was a bit tipsy at that point, I was fine, and jumped right into that prime dancing mode without the awkward warm up time. 

There was a jam session for people who came from afar for this event. There were a few people from Tochigi, other parts of Japan, one guy from abroad. I figured swing people already knew me, so I was safe, but the cute blue-haired, super amazing lead girl pushed me forward, because it ended up being kind of a foreigner jam, so I didn't argue, cuz I'm a Leo and get to be the center of attention, and then I get to dance with everyone 😁 Right before this, I was asked to dance by a Japanese swing-dancer guy I hadn't met before. After the jam, we danced, and he was amazing! Then, he asked for a second dance, which my proud self was glad to accept, that this super awesome dancer actually wanted a second dance with me?! I talked to another guy after, and then we danced and he could kick so high when we did Charleston, I was like, my old ballerina skills better come back and beat this man's kick! The funniest thing was we were all speaking only Japanese during the event, but actually, they both knew really good English! I didn't find that out until later, when I met another cool Canadian girl who was new to Japan. I am glad that they spoke Japanese to me at first though! I want to have more chances to actually use Japanese, you know living in Japan and all, and most people are very quick and eager to try to speak whatever English they know, which often is not a lot, so it makes it hard to get to really get to know people. For me, personally, at least. I'd rather that you dive in with Japanese, I follow the best I can, which is pretty decent, and getting better, then if I'm reeeeeally lost, I will let you know, and then, we can try to figure out the English. I don't want to just be an English language partner, I want friendship, no matter what language we do it in!

Anyway, after the event, one of the guys finally invited me to the after party! I finally had my chance to break into the swing friend group. They now knew I know enough Japanese to communicate, and that I'm truly interested in swing and permanently gonna be in Japan. It all starts here, and man, was it a good start! We went to grab some craft beers at a local brewery. I talked a lot more deeply to everyone in English and Japanese.  After the brewery served their last orders, we ended up on the way to the event leaders' home after stopping to grab some drinks to bring with us. They cooked us dinner, and I talked and listened and learned a lot about the swing community.

Here's to some more fun theatre rehearsal and swing dance adventures!

Which will be this weekend...and a festival...will be posted here! 😉

I went to Hitachi Seaside Park, Hoshiimo Sweet Potato Shrine, and Saw Black Swans in Ibaraki Japan this Golden Week...2 Truths and a Lie

May 2022 

One of the 3 things in this title were meant to happen, and the other 2 were accidental little gems we found instead of what we had planned.

So you know the famous park in Ibaraki Japan with the Baby Blue Eye flower fields and the ocean? 

Hitachi Seaside Park. This one.

(Image from google and link here)

Well, I finally had a day where me and husband were both off and we could borrow his parents car. We left the house at 9:30, picked up the car and hit the road.

And then, we hit the worst traffic jam I can remember ever being in in my LIFE. It was the first official day of Golden Week, which meant the day everyone leaves to travel. We learned a lesson that day. LEAVE at like 6am if you must travel the first day of Golden Week out of Tokyo by car. Anyway, I had my camera and music and each other, and a whole day ahead of us, so we made the best of it.

What Sonic the Hedgehog level is this??

Sooooo many rice fields

So after 8 hours (!!!!!!!!!!) (supposed to be about a 3 hour drive...) We finally made it!!!!

...just kidding. This is just a small patch of nemophilia in a parking lot about 5 minutes away from the park because WE DIDN'T MAKE IT IN TIME. That's right, we left at 9:30 am and we arrived at the line for the parking lot an hour before their 5 o'clock 

 closing time, and we made it to the ticket area by 4:50. So no flowers for us this year

.........

Plan B: (which we were considering might happen as we slowly were realizing we might not actually make it by the 5 o'clock closing time) was to drive to the end of that same road and see some ocean, so we did.

Next up was to head to a park he'd found online! Literally, all the parks, aquariums, and zoos closed at 5 except for this park. Another thing I wanted to do was to find the grocery store called Kasumi, which is like everywhere in Ibaraki (at least in my experience) and get their yaki imo because Ibaraki grows satsuma imo sweet potatoes and they're AMAZING. So, I checked google maps and found something very strange and interesting sounding nearby...Hoshiimo Jinja!!!! Hoshi imo is dried sweet potato (not AS good as yaki imo but same potato made it). It was 5 minutes from our current location, so we went. I found the god and place meant for me XD It's a newly built shrine (4 years ago, so 2018? The first year of Reiwa in the Japanese calendar) literally dedicated to hoshi imo, A shrine for dried sweet potato!!!

And they had an imo bike you could pose with XD

And there was a hoshiimo vending machine, and it was delicious, perfect texture (and also what's hanging out of my mouth in the above photos)

After that, we headed to Chinami Park. Actually I'm trying to google it now but it looks like its all like one big park with small bits all possibly even connecting to Kairakuen which is the only one of the 3 famous gardens of Japan I haven't been to yet in Mito! We didn't go very far, just wandered a bit of Senba lake, but that 15 minutes was all we needed. We found 2 black swans!! Neither of us had ever seen a real one before, and they came close when we called to them!

After that, we'd decided we’d had our fill of adventure for the day, and headed back to Tokyo (which took only about 3 hours, by the way)

The moral of this story is, as long as you are open minded and positive, you can find adventure everywhere even when your plans fail! I have many memories and so does my husband of traveling when things go wrong, and everyone gets stressed and ends up unhappy, and I'm so glad that we aren't that way. I'm always positive and see the best in everything, and he is oppositely negative and assumes the worst, but we are both very chill, go-with-the-flow people and it balances out. He keeps me realistic, but I show him the light. He's happy when I am happy, and I'm always looking at the bright side, so together, we are perfect traveling partners <3