Today we went to Miurakaigon for the Sakura (cherry tree) blossom festival. These trees are a dark pink and are rare. They bloom early and only stay with blooms for 10 days. (All the other cherry trees— white and light pink bloom in March.). This took the whole day as it was 1 1/2 hours from Tokyo with several transfers. It’s out by the beach. We walked through the blossoms — about 1000 trees!! We went with Aisa— Becky’s Japanese friend from her ward. She was a lot of fun and wanted to show us her country and the beauty of these Sakura blossoms!! There were little farmers markets all throughout with people selling their fresh veggies from their gardens! (In one of the pictures Bill is holding a Daikon raddish which the Japanese use a lot. The man said they get even bigger than this! I wonder if they taste good the bigger they get? This one was the size of a small child!) We found so many beautiful veggies with deep vibrant colors! One of which was a type of broccoflower, only it looked so different...with spiraling "pine trees" instead of regular trees. Becky bought some and said it was really good. We went to lunch and had fish dumplings and typical Japanese food. We went to the grocery store and got different things. Aisa helped us know what was what. She is so cute! Becky treated all of us to some custard which was super yummy! We ate it under a cherry tree, of course! It was just a gorgeous day and I felt like I was in a piece of heaven on earth! At the grocery store the lady who checked us out was an older Japanese woman who just went FULL JAPANESE on us and we couldn't understand A WORD she spoke... Bill and I just sat there and laughed. We wondered if we should tell her we didn't speak Japanese, but she wasn't even looking at us...just talking a steady stream of Japanese. The people here are so lovely and wonderful! They seem to be less affected by the world? I don't know, but I feel like they are such polite and kind people! We caught our trains back to Tokyo and I might've dozed on the way back... A fun day!! We got back to Becky’s and visited for a bit and then grabbed our luggage, got a taxi and headed for our hotel for the Edward Jones portion of our trip. We stayed at the Westin Tokyo— a gorgeous hotel in a very swanky area!! We went to the welcome dinner and then turned in early.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments
(
Atom
)
0 comments:
Post a Comment