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After January in Sendai, we moved yet again, this time to Hiroshima. We are still on the east coast of the main island, but we're now south of Tokyo, rather than north. (Sorry it has been a while since the last post, but there are 3 more currently in the works with everything that has been keeping us busy!)
Moving
It was an uneventful move. Since our apartment in Sendai was very minimally furnished (no drying rack for laundry, no kitchen utensils, really only a bed and desk) we bought an extra suitcase to be sure we would have enough space for the couple extra things we purchased. It was a squeeze to get to Sendai, so I don't think we could have made the move with just two suitcases, but 3 meant we had plenty of extra space. We shipped our 3 suitcases and the mattress topper we had bought so on the train we each had a backpack, duffle bag, and disassembled bike.
It was a longer day for sure, especially since it is a long-ish train from Tokyo to Hiroshima, but we made it without much hassle. Jesse and I booked seats in separate train cars so we wouldn't take up too much of the extra baggage area with our bikes, and I ended up next to a German man for the train from Tokyo to Hiroshima. When one of the stewards came by I am 95% sure she assumed he was my dad! 😅
Our New Apartment
Our new apartment is so new! I think our neighborhood in Sendai was particularly nice, but this new apartment is so much better than the last one and since it was only completed in October we are the first tenants.
We face the small parking area instead of a busy street, the doors are much more soundproof, and while the main room itself is smaller, we have a couch and coffee table, and the bathroom is very nice.
The bath has an automated panel so (provided you are able to understand it's verbal instructions in Japanese) you can set it to automatically fill the bath with a certain volume of water, and choose the temperature. The fan is also very fancy. It has an exhaust function of course, but also hot and cold air functions. I love that I can press a button, start getting ready for my shower, and a few minutes later step into a lovely warm room. Can I bring the entire bath unit back with us to Canada? Pretty please?
Fukuoka
So what have we been up to since arriving in Hiroshima? Jesse was particularly busy with work when we first arrived so we didn't get out and explore quite as much as I think we did when we first arrived in Sendai. But we did visit Fukuoka not too long ago!
Jesse's company is undergoing some restructuring, so while his team is currently changing a lot, some of his former teammates are working in Fukuoka nearby with a Japanese client for a few weeks. So when one of them asked if we might have time to meet up we said "sure!" and took the train down for the family day long weekend (especially nice that Jesse kept the Canadian holidays).
On Saturday evening we met up with one of his coworkers and went for a local hot-pot type meal. This particular coworker is Japanese and actually grew up in a smaller town nearby, but focused a lot on his English in middle school and has been in Canada for quite a while so he has very good English, while being a fluent Japanese speaker. It was nice to have someone else figure out the menu for once and we had a great time chatting!
The next morning we took a cycling tour of Fukuoka where we were joined by a lovely American couple. He was a retired air-force engineer, while she was a retired special education teacher from Colorado who had decided to apply to teach on an international base for a bit of adventure. This is their fourth year in Okinawa, and on holidays they take time to explore when they can. We visited some shrines and temples, and the tour included a stop at both a local sweets shop and a local ramen shop.
Weaving!
During the tour we had passed by the Folk Craft Museum, so naturally I wanted to go check it out. Turns out they had a working Jacquard loom and there was even a woman weaving on it when we were there! I was so happy. I have been wanting to do some weaving but I obviously didn't bring either of my looms with me, and it's always fun to geek out about fiber crafts. And a working Jacquard loom isn't common, even if it was small!
The gif to the right is the Jacquard loom. What makes them special is the punch cards you see hanging in a big loop from the top. They allow you to repeatedly make incredibly detailed patterns by without having to individually "pick" the threads which is when you choose the over or under threads by hand. Based on where the holes are punched in the cards, that allows the loom to lift a custom group of threads each time. Some patterns can have hundreds of cards in them, and would take an incredibly long time to do by hand. Plus if the punch cards don't have any errors in them, then neither should the finished pattern.
While I was happily watching, Jesse was reading the signs nearby and he said they let folks weave during the last hour of the day. So of course we had to stay for that! It was so much fun to weave on the traditional Japanese 4-shaft loom. It's very similar to my loom back home, but there are still some small differences. For instance, the place where you sit is built into the loom so it feels like you climb into the machine, rather than pull up a chair.
Captions: (below from left to right) me weaving on the 2 shaft loom, my loom back home which is a 4 shaft loom, and the professional weaver watching my work.
teamLab exhibit
After the tour, we took a quick nap back at our hotel before heading out to see another art installation by teamLab. According to their website they are "an international art collective [which] seeks to navigate the confluence of art, science, technology, and the natural world". We enjoyed their installation in the Botanical Garden in Osaka and they happen to have an exhibit in Fukuoka as well.
This one focused more on animals, rather than highlighting the surrounding natural environment like it had in Osaka. The first room featured a jungle projected onto the wall and floor, and you used an app on your phone to take pictures of and "capture" and "release" the animals on the wall. The more of each specific animal you caught, the more information you got about them. It was a little frustrating to use, but Jesse and I both caught a reasonable selection before moving on.
The middle sections were more abstract with slanted trampoline floors and large hemisphere bubbles that changed pattern for a few moments when you stepped on them, but the final room was a large area with a slanted and uneven floor. While the animals throughout the exhibit were all creatively coloured, the last room was particularly abstract and responded to your presence in a number of ways. For example, if you moved, the animals nearby might scurry away, or if you stood still flowers would bloom around you, only to separate into individual petals and drift away when you moved again.
I didn't understand at first, but off to the side was a section where you could choose a colouring page and once you were done your drawing was scanned and added to the projections in the room. I chose a flower and Jesse coloured a snake, and when they joined the creatures in the room it was exhilarating! (I wonder how long it took to sort out all the troubleshooting to get it to work that smoothly!)
Science Museum
The final morning in Fukuoka we decided to visit the Fukuoka Science Museum and Planetarium. It was a neat place! They had a lot of interactive exhibits and the planetarium presentation was also really neat (although I slept very poorly at our hotel and I might have had a nap in the dark room with the comfy reclined seats).
I like that in the gift shop they had a number of "astronaut desserts" that have been freeze dried, just like at science and tech! Also a number of the constellations (Orion's belt, the Gemini twins) are the same which I wasn't expecting. I don't know much about Japanese mythology, but I would have expected that even if the constellations were similar, they would have different names and symbols. Even the planet names share some similarities, for example Neptune is "海王星" which literally means "ocean king star". Jupiter however, is "木星" which means "tree star" which I like.
Hiroshima Museum of History and Traditional Crafts
On my own I went to visit the Hiroshima Museum of History and Traditional Crafts. It wasn't too far from our house, and although there was no English at all (in fact I think the attendant was surprised to see a foreigner but I asked about the prices in Japanese so he probably figured I knew what I was doing) I still had a lovely time. There were so many different things! Essentially the main room was grouped into zones, with all the relevant tools for a particular activity on display. So there was an oyster fishing section with a diorama and baskets and tools, while across the way were the screens and grinders and baskets for seaweed collecting. There was a section for rice, and a section for textiles, and a section for shoes, and a couple more I don't remember. Once again, if only I could read more Japanese! (Jesse and I are still studying kanji, but you don't realize just how many words there are until you have to learn them from scratch).
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