Week 2, Golden Week in Nagoya, Japan

Another welcome party at University, this time on Millies' Printmaking course ( milliepopovic.blogspot.com). There was some alternative entertainment...a tribute to a popular anime/manga tv show...

National holidays! Easter Sunday with a seafood meal and one boiled egg... Golden week begins with flying fish outside our apartment and all sorts for Children's Day.

This gets me very excited to go food shopping!

Traditional Japanese Flower Arranging. Our landlady invited us to her exhibition and a tea ceremony. The tea ceremony was a ritualistic, you have to appreciate and give time to drinking the frothy creamy green tea and green tea paste sweet, even the ceramic bowl it is in. Lots of bowing. We were asked by the local journalist to say a few words on our experience; ''Yoshi''- yummy! Cant wait to see that article!

A bit of normality. We watch the royal wedding on the internet with homemade flags, Anna the other international girl in the apartment downstairs and the most vile cold green tea drink. Oh, and washing day on the balcony with a book. Iv finished it now, well worth a read; 'Hokkaido Highway Blues: Hitchhicking Japan' by Will Ferguson.

Stumbled along a temple in Nagoya. Lovely.

Shopping in Nagoya. Finding cute antique and handmade stores, we were all given cute knitted cat broaches. Secondhand kimono's, bizzare inventions for making your mouth slimmer?!, inside of your water bottle cleaners, cheap electrical stores.

Bike riding. We are in the suburbs of a large industrial port city but around there are lovely traditional houses and concrete houses and allotments and farmlands. A confused landscape.