Well, April 1st has come and gone, and that means two things: 1 was that I was subject to a lot of silly April Fool's Youtube videos and 2 is that the sakura trees have started to bloom!
Je vois la vie en rose.
"I see life in shades of pink."
Right now je vois la vie en rose because of two reasons:
(#1)-All around my house bright pink cherry blossoms have bloomed.
(#2)-栃木駅でマリアと私の秘密な約束しました。
Number two is naisho da yo so don't even try to guess it! LOL. I can be so mature, I know.
Today I went to Ichiba Market in Ashikaga with my host dad. It was a wonderful, wonderful place. It was a big warehouse full of boxes of fruits and stock items like pans and pots. Trucks were zooming in and out dropping off loads and the whole place smelled like fresh air and fish and people and car exhaust. It was so vibrantly ALIVE that I loved it. And my host-dad goes there at least weekly to pick up supplies for the restaurant, so I tagged along because I wanted to spend more time with my host family lately because I have been doing alot of hanging out out of the house, with friends and such. So I came along, and we chatted in the car about how Mizushima Hiro got engaged to Ayaka, and how cute it was because they are both #1 Popular in Japan right now, Mizushima is, arguably, of course, the #1 popular boy and Ayaka is, also arguably, the #1 popular girl and they got engaged. And I have never heard of Ayaka so my host dad played some of her music in the car on the way up.
This is Ayaka and Mizushima Hiro, by the way:
It turns out they have been married since February but didn't tell Japan until yesterday. My school was in an uproar. Well, the girls were anyway. The boys in my school only care about baseball.
Anyway, enough about "life-shaking" current-events, back to my story about Ichiba Market.
When we got out of the car, we were surrounded by burly old sailors and farmers and other like-sorts and they saw my host dad and were like "TAKASHI-SAN!" Because it's the kind of place that only looks daunting. Truthfully, everybody knows everybody else and there was a really warm atmosphere. These two little girls, Arina and Anji, were sisters. They were maybe 3 and 5 years old. They mother and grandmother run the fresh vegetable portion of the Ichiba Market so they have lived there all their lives. They are so cute. And it really seemed like a good place for kids to grow up because they said they wanted to go buy juice, so Anji (the older one) ran to the cash register and unlocked it and grabbed a 1,000 Yen note (about 10 dollars) and then grabbed Arina's hand and they skipped off to the juice, weaving through wheelbarrows of fresh vegetables, trucks carrying pounds of meat, and crowds of people like it was second nature.
Later I saw them pushing eachother, (and like five other little kids) on one of those giant push carts, the kind where you can stack boxes on and wheel around.
It was so sweet.
Then I bonded with my host mom because I made an apple pie! From scratch. She stayed in the kitchen and we listened to some of my favorite songs off of my Zune, and we gabbed about pies and apples and other important things.
:)
Life is good.
No comments:
Post a Comment