On Saturday we met some co-workers at a park near Utsunomiya for a Japanese style BBQ. The weather was beautiful, a perfect fall day for the event.
I was asked to bring some American type BBQ food for everyone to eat, along with the Japanese cuisine. The best I could muster up in Japan was Johnsonville brats from a foreign food store. Kate was able to get some buns (typically the hotdogs/sausage are not eaten on buns in Japan) and we took some of the US ketchup and mustard that we brought with us. The US ketchup tastes different to us now that we have been here a year and we have hardly used any of what we brought. Everyone appeared to really enjoy them and thanked us for bringing them.
Here Shiono san is giving some to his son Hiroto to try, both of Tatsu and Aiya's children are getting so big.
Next up was the yaki soba and yaki niku (grilled noodles and grilled meat)
Watanabe san and Waku san took charge of the grill to cook it up.
Corn hole was too big to bring with us to Japan, so we brought an Ohio State ball slinger (ladder golf, hillbilly golf, insert your preferred name here). We were able to convince a number of people to try it and it was fun watching people from other BBQ's walk by and gawk at the game to see what it was.
On Sunday we went to the community center for a festival and potter making. To start the pottery we were shown some pottery that was excavated and reconstructed. The pots we were making were to be styled after them.
I didn't catch the date they were from, but it was a bit scary to see them placed on a wobbly table for display. Inside you could see the markings from the excavation.
To start we were each given a large block of clay. We had to knead it to make it softer. From there we just made a bunch of clay snakes and stacked them one on top of the other smoothing in between each layer.
Pictured is Kate after finishing the first portion of her pot.
And me and the children. The children finished quickly and then spent time making various other clay objects, you can see them around there table space.
After lunch we did the finish decorating on the pots. For texture we twisted a piece of special paper into what looked like a braid, then rolled in on the outside of the pot. Finally we added some final touch detail with small pieces of clay and chopsticks were used to mark them. Unfortunately I forgot to take pictures of the finished product, so I will have to get some when we go back in a few weeks to fire the pieces.
For lunch we hit up the festival stands. I had tako yaki, Kate and the children had soup and other Japanese fair food. For dessert Colleen had a choco banana. These guys are actually artists that use the banana as there form of median. Here is the artist at work..
This is some of his artwork on display.
And Colleens selection. It had a pringles and bugle hat, pretzel arms, sprinkle pants, gumdrop eyes, and a sweet cookie mouth. A great choice.
On Saturday while at the park Liam found a huge Japanese hornet. This is the second one we have found in the last year, but the first was hit by a car and a bit mangled. This one was intact and barely alive when he found it. We put it in a cup to bring it home. So far I have not seen any of these flying around and I don't think I want to either, they are huge. I attached a couple of interesting links for you to watch. Kate said the first one is too disturbing for her. It is 30 Japanese hornets against 30,000 European honey bees. The result is not pretty..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fTrSOFyfxs
The second is the scout hornet against a hive of Japanese honey bees. This result is a little different.
Nature can be amazing. I can't believe these bees figured out that the hornet can only survive 115 degrees and they can make it to 118.
That is all for this post, have a good week...
No comments:
Post a Comment