Give Me Bananas

Oh boy I’m still jet lagged and my internal clock is all wrong. I went to bed at 10pm last night and was already wide awake by 4am which was actually good because it might help me to get up earlier now .

So I finally have some time to write about Japan. 10 days were way too short but the length of the stay isn’t very important when your reason to fly more than 13 hours (one way) is your grand father’s funeral.

Ok, maybe I should start at the beginning:

Sel and I at 5:30 am before we left. Note the tiny eyes (4,5 hours of sleep before a long flight is silly, Karin!!!).

The flight from Zurich to Paris was uneventful. Just how short distance flights are. Once in Paris we stumbled upon this little gem:

A semi healthy food shop at an airport? I almost danced to the place

… And got a sandwich, nut bar and WATER.

 

Proper hydration seriously changes everything! The flight was almost enjoyable even though I hated sitting for 11+ hours. Air France has some really great films though and I spent most of the flight watching “The Time Traveler’s Wife”, “Terminator” (haha I know.. I just watched it because Sam Worthington is in it ), “The Hangover”, “UP” and “Love Actually”. The real journey started when we got to Osaka.

My grandma lives so far away from civilisation, it’s crazy. First we had to take the train to Shin-Osaka. Then to Okayama. Then to Soja. Then the Taxi to my grandma’s place. I was dead by the time we got there because I can never sleep in planes but was so happy to be “home”.

I crashed at 4pm (local time) and slept through New Years.

We spent the first day hanging out and relaxing and walking around. Here’s Selina with her feet under the kotazu. There’s no central heating (!) and my grandma has one stove/heater thing in the living room and one in the kitchen. The kotazu is the greatest invention ever (right after the toothbrush maybe). It’s a table with a heating underneath and absolutely glorious!

 

Windy walks…

  

(These are all rice fields by the way. They look amazing in Summer. Winter makes everything so brown, sigh..)

On the next day we went shopping in Kurashiki which is a gorgeous city.

 

There’s a huge mall close to the city where we wanted to go to. There were so many people, it was insane! (Most shops were still closed in the city because of the New Years but the mall was open so everyone went there)

 

 

On the next day (the 3rd) we prepared everything for the ceremony. Death is more “important” in Buddhism than in Christianity (not to offend any Christian readers but there are so many more ceremonies after a Buddhist person dies). First there is a ceremony when you cremate the body and then after 49 days there’s a second one when you put the urn into the grave. Afterwards there’s a ceremony after one year, three (I think) & seven years and so on and so forth. It’s to “help the soul on the journey after death”.

Anyway, we went to Japan for the 49th day which wasn’t a sad day by the way. I was having a hard time when we got there and saw that shrine with my grandpa’s photo but the ceremony on the 49th day was beautiful and not sad at all. I’m more worried about my grandmother because she’s all alone now. She told me that it’s sad not to be able to talk to anyone in the evening. I wish there’s something I could do.

One of the main parts of that day is the food. I will talk about all of other things that we ate in an other post but this had to be mentioned here. It’s all about the food. Seriously.

We prepared everything when the rest of the guests went to the grave.

 

One person got the following:

 

Insane isn’t it?? Selina and I ate in the kitchen which was great because there weren’t many vegetarian options and I could happily nibble on the veggie sushi and eat carrots in true rabbit style.

The food got catered, there’s no way we could have prepared something like that.

The day got merrier after the guests had a couple of sakes. It was a gorgeous day and my grandpa would have been happy, I’m sure.

 

On the following day we just relaxed again (there really isn’t that much to do there!) and took walks. We also hiked on the Kompira-sama which is a hill with a shrine on top. It’s kind of a tradition to hike up there every time we visit my grandparents (now grandma only…)

 

We even found some snow…

 

 

…And on the next day we already said goodbye to my darling grandmother and went to KYOTO!! Even though we only spent 1,5 days there we experienced a lot and saw so many great things. I will write all about it in my next Japan recap post.

 

Stay tuned for the Kyoto and (most importantly) FOOD recaps!!!

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 10th, 2010 at 11:30 am and is filed under Travelling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.