tomatoes and cucumbers!

I'm getting a little lazy about my blog...
and, I have been somewhat busy the past couple days! Surprise!

So I will make this brief but hopefully informative.
On Sunday I went with Ema, Miyako and Makito to a running race in the northern part of Kumamoto that my uncle helped to organize. Ema was participating in it with members from her high school, similar to the MTB race the week before. The race was on a mountain where a large hotel was and the trail wound all around the woods around the hotel. It was beautiful! It was early in the morning when we arrived and from the starting point you could see far off mountains and still low clouds wispy in the valley.
The race started and I walked around the Miyako-obachan with Ema's coach's son, who had just turned 2. He was adorable! Rather serious but in love with pin wheels, or, Kurukuru:)
The race was a relay and Ema the third to run. We were on the trail when she came running down a little hill through a tunnel or trees, reds and yellows and the sunlight shining perfectly - it could have been some kind of advertisement for shoes!
After the race we got to soak in the onsen at the hotel and eat a giant Italian buffet lunch! It was yummy.
The event was very fun, though we were pretty tired since we had gotten up early that morning and stayed up fairly late the night before.

On Monday I went to the town next Uto where my great aunt and uncle live. The family name is Shigemoto but I will refer to my great aunt and uncle as Ojiichan and Obaachan. I think I might have said this before but in Japan you don't use names all the time, but for a young woman you will say Oneisan, and for a young man Oneesan (meaning older sister and older brother) and for a middle aged people you will call them Aunt and Uncle and so on a so forth.
I was going to help them with their farm. They have four large green houses, two for tomatoes and two for cucumbers. When I first came, Mom's cousin's wife was outside the green house and she invited me to help harvest tomatoes. Mom's cousin's name is Yoshifumi-san, his wife is Chizuko-san. They have three children, he oldest son is Fumio, then another son Makoto and the youngest daughter Masumi. Fumio is the only of the children that works on the farm, the other two have seperate jobs. It was really nice to meet them and visit with these people who are my family. In Japan, my family is vast! My grandmother had 6 sister and I think my grandfather had about that many siblings as well. I think Yoshifumi-san said there were 22 cousins in their generation, what??? That's crazy!
But big families are fun...and I finally get to meet some of mine!
After tomato harvesting I chatted with Ojiichan and Obaachan a little while eating mikan and drinking milk coffee. They have an incredibly heavy Kumamoto-ben (dialect) so, truthfully, I probably only understand half of what they say. If that. Chizuko and Yoshifumi speak to me in more normal Japanese and understand that I don't always understand so it is a little easier. However, I am happy to say that I can feel my Japanese getting better, and it makes me so happy...!
I made boxes for the tomatoes and Chizuko put the tomatoes in the boxes. I tried, but it was too hard. The tomatoes have to be all of similar size and then when set in, they cannot move around, so it was like a puzzle and let's just say that puzzles are not my forte. So instead I went back to the tomato house and cut the leaves away from the tomatoes so that sunlight could reach them. That was fun, I enjoyed that very much. But earlier I got to go with Yoshifumi-san to another town where there was an Ichiba, basically a food distribution center. Smaller local farms bring their fruits, veggies, meat and fish there in the evenigns and in the morning it is auctioned off to all different stores. That is where they take most of their produce, but we just went to buy new flattened boxes for packaging. It must be incredible in the morning when it is full with boxes and boxes of food!

Obaachan gets her happiness from being generous, so when I went home she sent me with two bags full of vegetables that she made in her garden. Beautiful, fat turnips, carrots, tomatoes and cucumbers. Today she sent me home with mikan and two other oranges, one called Sweet Springs and the other called Deko-pon. She promised tomorrow she was going to make zenzai (sweet bean soup with mochi) because she remembered from a couple years ago that I really like it:)

Today I harvested cucumbers with Chizuko-san and cut leaves of the tomato plants. It took me three hours to do...I think, 2.5 rows. Ah! But I hope those tomatoes will be happy with lots of sunlight now!
It's been really fun, though. Today I got really sleepy, mostly I think because of the heat inside the green house, it's like 70 degrees or something in there...and also because I did a lot of talking and listening and that is very tiring because I have no English outlet like I do with Makito and Miyako - only Japanese. tsukareta (tired!)
I'm very grateful they are letting me help. Always new experiences...and with this family I never really knew!



This is completely off topic but recently I found out that that convention I went to with Muto-san in Aso was not called Green to Rhythm. It is Green Tourism. I felt like a total idiot when I found that out, because it is pretty obvious once you think about it, but it never occurred to me. The katakana makes it sound like this:
gu-ree-n tsu-ri-zu-mu.
Somehow, I got it locked in my head that tsurizumu was To Rhythm, not tourism...but it's obvious now! So, I apologize!

That's all for now...tired.