What do you call starting a sentence in French and mistakenly ending it in Japanese? Frepanese?...
I love watching birds in flight. Flight is something so mundane most of the time, but if you really stop to think about the fact that a heavier-than-air creature is suspending itself mid-air in and of its own power, it's mind blowing. Sometimes birds are going somewhere, and sometimes they're not. You can tell when they're in a holding pattern, moving to keep aloft but unable, unready, or unwilling to land. That's the kind of flight that amazes me, a kind of fluid airborn stasis....
 |
| Bandaiatami |
I visited Inawashiro (1 hour? 1.5 hours? by local train) to eat a hamburger. The burger was okay, but the bacon was more like a slice of pork. Actually, some friends were going to eat hamburgers, and I went to just get out. They make their own buns which were delicious and so are their onion rings. They serve a wonderful tartar sauce?/cole slaw? dip with the rings. The atmosphere is great, diner/American west. motorcycle people will fit right in.
 |
| Rice Harvest |
Inawashiro has a ghost town feel to it. It sits in a valley, more of a valley than Tamura. The main geological feature is Mount Bandaiatami, an active volcano which actually blew up recently, as far as a volcano is concerned, creating a series of lakes. This is on the other side of the mountain, the side we didn't see. The other important natural attraction is Lake Inawashiro (not the lakes caused by the eruption).
We didn't have a lot of time so we just went to Hero Burger which is about 30 minutes walking from the station through farmland. Inawashiro has a feeling of space, an openness that I'm not used to anymore. A lot of rice paddies are small or terraced into hills instead of being spread out on a flat piece of land. And I haven't walked through an expanse of rice paddies before. In Japan there is a tendency to fill. Near my school there is a blue American house with a short little picket fence and a green lawn, actually it's a restaurant, and it stands out because a lot of Japanese homes fill their precious little yard space with vegetables or gardens, and a lot of gardens have small trees in them. The Japanese garden that I know is dense and full, so it was strange to be in a place that's open. It's harvest season right now. I think it would have been prettier if I had gone earlier in the year when the rice was still green. It yellows into a wheatish color like the leaves on trees change colors. It would be something to see that expanse of rice paddies all green. But, the mountains, the mountains where beautiful, and Bandaiatami is distinctive. It points its peak towards Heaven, refusing to slump because it's the valley's sentinel and slumping isn't dignified.
 |
| A Shy Beauty |
 |
| Traditional Japanese house and garden |
What do you call starting a sentence in French and mistakenly ending it in Japanese? Frepanese?...
We didn't have a lot of time so we just went to Hero Burger which is about 30 minutes walking from the station through farmland. Inawashiro has a feeling of space, an openness that I'm not used to anymore. A lot of rice paddies are small or terraced into hills instead of being spread out on a flat piece of land. And I haven't walked through an expanse of rice paddies before. In Japan there is a tendency to fill. Near my school there is a blue American house with a short little picket fence and a green lawn, actually it's a restaurant, and it stands out because a lot of Japanese homes fill their precious little yard space with vegetables or gardens, and a lot of gardens have small trees in them. The Japanese garden that I know is dense and full, so it was strange to be in a place that's open. It's harvest season right now. I think it would have been prettier if I had gone earlier in the year when the rice was still green. It yellows into a wheatish color like the leaves on trees change colors. It would be something to see that expanse of rice paddies all green. But, the mountains, the mountains where beautiful, and Bandaiatami is distinctive. It points its peak towards Heaven, refusing to slump because it's the valley's sentinel and slumping isn't dignified.
Comments
Post a Comment