Coming of Age Day

Today was a national holiday in Japan (Coming of Age Day – age 20 here), so Kana and Shin didn’t have to go to work! After a simple breakfast of toast and fruit this morning, I was able to spend some time reading about King Uzziah (2 Chronicles 26 and 2 Kings 14-15) before going to the grocery store with Shin. I loved it! What an experience! Way more fish than I’ve ever seen in one place. Crazy stuff like squid, octopus, scallops, dried foods, a huge selection of tofu, skinny cucumbers, fat carrots, Japanese lunch boxes, expensive apples and grapes, and so much more. I loved it! And Shin and I got along just fine. His English is pretty good! The cash register was pretty high-tech – the cashier fed the bill into the machine, and it spit back out the change. No brains needed at all. ;) For lunch we had zaru soba (noodles made from konjak), which we dipped in hot soy sauce with leek in it. I even tried a bite with wasabi on it….I won’t be doing that again. Wow did that burn!! But at least it didn’t last long. We also had iridori (sweetly seasoned chicken, carrots, renkon – had holes in it, shitake mushrooms – still a weird texture but the flavor was better because it was sweet, ginong - yellow nut), satoimu (taro – type of slimy potato), and nori. Kana let me try her nattou (a type of soy bean), which was okay but not great. She mixed in a mustard and sauce, and it was very gooey.

After figuring out that I have a 44# weight limit for my next flights (I came with 50# on the way over) and panicking slightly, I got calligraphy lessons from Yoshiko (who teaches it to elementary students). She demonstrated horizontal and vertical lines, dots, some lines with curves, some lines with turns, and a triangle one that was very difficult before letting me practice. I copied the characters for the words love (“ai”), flower (“hana”), and faith (“makoto”). It was complicated! Lots of strokes, and they weren’t too easy. Japanese calligraphy is much harder than it looks. Now I’ll appreciate it more! Yoshiko did hope (“kibou”) for me. So now I have faith, hope, and love….the greatest of which is love. (I’ve been memorizing 1 Corinthians 13. ;)

I enjoyed a macha tea latte (mmm!) with Kana and Shin this afternoon as I labeled pictures and journaled. We also watched some sumo wrestling on TV. For supper we had sukiyaki – beef, tofu, leek, and zaru soba cooked in the pot on the table with soy sauce and sugar. Delicious! You dip the stuff into a bowl of beaten raw egg. Honestly, I could hardly taste the egg. It was delicious! It was sweet, so I loved it. We had 5 rounds of this stuff!!!! The rest of the evening was spent watching figure skating, the news, exploring the wonders of Google Earth, talking, and teaching each other card games. It was a great, relaxing holiday.