Gaijin buddies!

Hurray! We finally have some friends!

Shae (one of Erica's friends) got in touch with us about a month ago and asked us to go to an Indian Restaurant for lunch with her... and she brought other English teachers with her! We met Brian (from Nashville), Eric (From Michigan), Elle (From Niagara Falls), and Adrian (from Melbourne)! Woohoo! Since then, we've hung out with them a number of times and done a ton of interesting things (Including climbing on the roofs of buildings, watching intense animal videos, going to karaoke with limited English songs, going to the batting cages at 10 at night, going to see temple illuminations and, just yesterday, we went to see a taiko drumming performance)

Anyway, we're really happy to have met these guys, and I think that our stay here will be a lot more enjoyable because of them!

Adrian (AKA Marley)


Looks natural, doesn't it...?




Marley, Eric and Elle



Jim and Brian (AKA Sandy Vag)








Kongoin Temple illumination in Maizuru

Miyazu

During our vacation (back in October) we took the chance to visit a place called Amonahashidate (the Bridge to Heaven). It is a land bridge attaching one part of a bay to the other. It is located about 45 minutes away from Maizuru in another town called Miyazu.

Some beautiful scenery viewed from the chairlift

The first thing we did upon our arrival was take a chairlift up to the top of a nearby mountain that is great for viewing the bridge (by leaning over and looking through your legs) and also had a little amusement park. At the top, the view was beautiful, normally and through-the-legs style. The amusement park was not so impressive. There were things like a mini golf course, which was actually just a series of holes dug along a small patch of grass. No obstacles, no greens, no starting markers... just holes in the ground.
We rode on some go-karts, which were a lot of fun. Except that my legs were too long, so every time I turned I would bash my knee in with the second steering wheel (see picture).

After a jaunt on the ferris wheel we went back down the chairlift and wandered around for a little while. We found some interesting souvenirs. Then we made our way to the land bridge. Before we could start walking across we had to wait for a few boats to pass the bridge. It was pretty cool to see the motorized bridge rotate rather than lift in the middle.

The bridge itself was very beautiful, and we were there during the sunset. Meaning it was very beautiful, but also rather cold. So we only made it about 40% across the bridge before turning back and deciding to go find food.

We actually decided to find a Mcdonald's, but on our way to Miyazu we had spotted a crab shack. When we saw it again we realized that we hadn't spent much money on our vacation so we could afford to have a crab dinner. The restaurant was absurd. There was a boat in front of the kitchen. It was full of water and that is where they kept the crabs before killing them. I'd say before boiling them, but when we received our dinner we quickly realized that none of the crab meat had been cooked. There was also no butter to be found. So we were definitely eating crab Japanese style. The dinner was pretty good and the view was excellent.

After that we made our way back home. Thanks for reading!

Kinosaki

First up!

The first new addition to our blog must be our new little friends!!

Jim and i decided to purchase some little critters for me to coo at. We bought two orange fish (I couldn't tell you what kind they are) that we named "The Sisters" (after Daniel and Henrik Sedin heh heh) and we also got 3 snails which we named "The Cling-ons"...

So here's one of the strangest events I have witnessed regarding pets....

We went away for ONE SATURDAY NIGHT last month to Kinasaki (which will be written about later) and we figured that the little guys would be fine by themselves for one night, reasonable enough, right?

hah! We returned the following Sunday only to discover that Daniel had COMPLETELY disappeared! I know that the "darn fish jumped out of the tank and killed itself" scenario must happen often to fish owners everywhere... but this little guy was nowhere to be found! He wasn't in the bowl anywhere, he wasn't on the table, he wasn't on the floor... hmm...

Possible scenarios:

1. He jumped out of the bowl and remains in some forgotten place in the house
2. He got stuck in between/below the tatami mats on the floor and is still there (I think we would have smelled him by now, though)
3. Henrik ate him during a bout of rage (very unlikely due to the mouth:body size ratio)
4. The snails ate him...:|

None of the above bode well for the little fellow....

Anyway, after 2 weeks of mourning/living in complete disbelief we bought Daniel2! Everything's A OK so far....

Also, our 3 snails managed to produce a 4th! How on earth do snails mate/spawn/fertilize, anyway? Must be awkward...

The late Daniel with Henrik and the clingons

Daniel2!

More posts to follow soon!

We're still alive!!

Hello friends!

We are so sorry for leaving everyone out of the loop for so long! We have been quite preoccupied (to say the least) with work and haven't really found time to do our routine blogging....but hopefully we'll get back on track as of now!

Quite a lot has happened over the last while! We have new pets, Jim has been kidnapped by the Calgary Flames (:|), I've been knitting my free-time away, we're met some other English teacher friends and we're going to CHINA AND THAILAND for our X-mas vacation!! All very exciting... details will follow!

g

Just a Couple of Grinders

We bought a car! It is a red Nissan Wingroad, unfortunately we didn't think to take a picture of it so that will have to wait until our next post.

Currently we are just working away at our teaching jobs and previous to our car purchase things were a little grim around here. We were pretty much working with our eyes on the weekend, and once the weekend got here we would just sit around and try to recuperate or if we were lucky we'd meet up with Asamoto-san.

(The Maizuru area really is very beautiful, we are eagerly anticipating autumn)

Now we are in a better position. Last Friday our insurance finally went through and we were able to pick up the car and drive around. It actually didn't take me very long to get used to driving on the left side of the road (my theory is that with the steering wheel on the other side of the car it is pretty familiar being closer to the centre line).

Georgia's first turn driving was a little rougher, because she hasn't driven an automatic since her drivers test and tried to use two feet (one on gas, one on brake). Soon she'll be motoring around the city though.

We decided to take advantage of our mobility and make our way to a beach. This was actually a fairly difficult task for us because there are no english maps to be found in Maizuru. Seriously. None. Even google maps lists the majority of places in Japan in Japanese and the directions we got weren't helpful whatsoever.

Anyways, we decided to simply drive toward the coast and continue exploring until we found one and luckily it worked for us. We drove for about 35 minutes and found a nice, nearly deserted beach.




We played frisbee for a little bit and then we went for a walk along the beach. On our way back to the place we left our stuff, we saw something red floating in the water.


At first I had no idea what we were looking at, in fact, I was worried it was a dress or clothing or something and we were the discoverers of.... MURDER! But, it turned out to be a little less dramatic.



Next we thought that it might be a dead jellyfish or something. Soon something else showed up and looked as though it were eating the dead sea animal.



We really thought that there were two animals involved here and one of them was scrounging up a meal but soon enough the tide carried the body close enough for us to see.



A dead squid turned out to be what we had stood around gawking at for about 10 minutes. It was pretty interesting to see it up close and poke it and stuff. Having only rarely visited oceans in my first 23 years of life, seeing ocean creatures up close is definately cool, even if they are dead.





After the squid adventure we decided to make a sandcastle. It, of course, sucked... but all we had was a frisbee and the sun was drying up our sand really quickly. So I decided to destroy our hard work.




Here is my Georgia, looking as lovely as ever :)