My First Day Abroad

Surprisingly, I slept all the way through the night soundly, even though the floor is pretty uncomfortable. Their house is small, but it is not too bad. They have one room full of boxes from their recent move to the suburbs, two bedrooms, one bath and a dinning room/ living room/kitchen area. The only furniture is the dinning room table and a coffee table. I decided to have a traditional Japanese breakfast, which is hot rice with raw egg and wasabi mixed in. you eat it with nori (seaweed). It wasn’t that bad even though I stop thinking that I was willingly eating raw egg…I am not that into raw animals/animal products...haha. The chopsticks are hard to use and I make a huge mess at every meal but it is getting easier.

Olivia, Jake, and I went to a park that was huge and beautiful. We rented bikes and barely managed to see half the park, even at Jake’s fast pace. Inside, every single tree is perfectly manicured and touched to make each branch look a certain way. It is cherry blossom season and everything was absolutely spectacular. Inside of the park there is a garden that they spend even more time on, making it look perfect and natural. Inside that garden is another garden, called the Bonsai Garden, which they spend even more time on then anything else. In the Bonsai Garden are trees that you pass on from generation to generation. Each tree was 80-250 years old and they are miniature and bizarre, yet delicate and beautiful. They rap these cords around the branches to form them and bind them. The tiny trees live in a very thin layer of soil with a stone slab underneath. I don’t know how they can survive with their roots constantly being trimmed, but I guess a massive amount of fertilizer does the trick.

For lunch we had rice balls under these beautiful blooming cherry trees with fields of different types of flowers on each side of us. It was a cold day with gray skies, but still nice. There were lakes, fields of flowers, fields for games, weird playgrounds and craft areas, trees, and lots more. The bike was way tiny and I had it on the highest gear because I thought it was the lowest so it was a difficult ride. Or maybe it is the other way around…the peddling was much too easy that it made it harder.

I was exhausted by the time we got home. But I had to stay awake until a reasonable hour in order to get used to the time difference. Dinner was a sort of soup with very thin strips of beef in it that you just dip in for a few seconds. It was...interesting. Every thing is IKEA style (put it together yourself) and so while you eat you go through the process of adding vegetables and meat. I am still not quite used to the time change.