During my time at Kunimoto, I was visited by two people that came to Japan with me in 2001. Kelvin arrived in Japan in December, and worked near Nagano for a couple of months, before coming to Utsunomiya for two weeks in February. It was awesome to catch up with him, as we both recognised the same changes around the city, most notably the name of the main shrine in the centre of town that we used to use as a meeting point. When we were here before, it was called “Futaarasan”, but has since changed to “Futaarayama”. It’s still spelt the same with the Chinese characters, but is said differently. Apparently this happens every now and again. Also, while Kelvin was here, we went on a trip to Mt Fuji. We left Utsunomiya at 5am, and stopped first at a cherry blossom festival in Izu, near where Liz lives. There were maybe five trees in bloom, as we were about a month early. Mt Fuji looked cool though, we stayed at a Japanese lodge for the night, and got up and watched the sunrise over Fuji. I, being the genius that I am, left my camera locked in the bus, so missed out on a couple of awesome photos. But it was great fun. There was a lot of snow, and I even saw my first frozen lake.
Speaking of Snow
We had a fair amount of the white stuff this year, but sadly, unlike Dunedin, everyone keeps working when it snows here. People don’t like driving, but they are still expected at work and school. Both times we had particularly heavy snowfalls, it lingered around for about a week afterwards, and made it a challenge to bring my scooter into it’s parking pace. It has finally started to warm up here though, which is always good.
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