On Nov. 9 we bid farewell to Iruma. Hana's cousin and his family were kind enough to drive us to the Shinkansen (bullet train) station and we were on our way to Toyama. It was a pretty fun drive. We spent most of it playing a Japanese vocabulary game. I did better at this game than I thought I would and it was both fun and good for my vocabulary. After about a two-hour train ride to Toyama, we arrived and were picked up by Hana's father.
Toyama is kind of an out of the way place tucked between the Japan Sea and the Japan Alps (in this sense of isolation, it is not unlike Regina). An incredibly beautiful city, it has retained some rural charm that other cities in Japan have lost. People here actually have quite spacious houses, some of which are just as large or larger than those back in Canada. We went for a long bike ride through a rural town and it was incredible. 23C, no wind, and mountain air. It really was hard to believe that it is the middle of November! Back home the temperatures (from what I can see online) have been well below 0C! It's going to be hard to come back!
We took Hana's Mom out for supper as it was her 60th birthday. This is quite a milestone in Japan and called for a bit of a celebration. We went out to a Chinese restaurant and the entire family had supper. It was a pretty good time.
I will admit that it has been a bit isolating here for me though -- my Japanese language skills are minimal (I basically have the vocabulary of a two-year old). This makes it difficult for me to communicate when Hana is not around. My sister-in-law, brother-in-law, and their children have arrived and we are doing our best to communicate. One of the great things about little kids is that they also have a somewhat limited vocabulary so they don't think twice about trying to communicate with you. For someone like me with limited speaking ability, having little kids around really takes some pressure off of social situations!
My inability to communicate well has created a fair amount of downtime for me -- the total opposite of life in Tokyo. This is actually a good thing right now. I have a bit of time to work on my language skills and simply recharge my batteries. Unfortunately, I've come down with a mild cold which is a bit of a downer. In the last three trips that I've made to Japan I've caught colds (I thought for sure on this one that I would get lucky and avoid this). It is no wonder though -- between the long and draining plane ride to the exhausting touring of Tokyo, one's immune system takes a real pounding.
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