Three days now until Miriam arrives and a week until we meet Mum and Dad. Definitely very exciting. I have purchased a larger teapot in their honour.
The day after I last wrote I did indeed go mushroom picking. Spring-time mushrooms (shidake) are grown on logs in shady wooded areas and there were a great many to be picked. It was a lovely afternoon though, perfect for wandering through the Japanese forest. I am very jealous of the basket-backpack that Yoshida-san had. I will try and invest in one for future foraging or going to the vege-market if I move back to Welly. Next month we will go collecting the "child of bamboo" while it is still young and tender.
I ate mushrooms every day for a week in an attempt to use up what wouldn't fit in the freezer, mushroom soup, fried mushrooms, baked mushrooms, mushrooms and rice... then salvation from my mushroom diet came in the form of 5 fellow English-teacher types coming to visit Oki for a stitch'n'bitch. I made them meat and mushroom pies that were rather light on meat...
It was nice to have more visitors and we did the essential Oki tour - the ￥100 shop, the 'mall' and the liquor store - and stitched away the grey afternoon.
Apart from that I have pretty much just been hanging at the office everyday and rewatching movies every evening. I am not sleeping terribly well so it is nice not to be in the classroom. I have a whole two days of school before I take off for the family tour!
An odd thing. On Saturday the sky was a funny shade of brown. Apparently this is a phenomenon called kosa which means Yellow Sand. It is dust from the desert in China blown over to Japan but strong spring winds. Although it has been common in spring for centuries it is getting more intense as the desert in China expands through environmental mismanagement. It was like living in sepia.
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