Last weekend

You may remember back in June I went rice planting with some of the other Shimonoseki JETs at the house of one of my conversation students.

Planting rice, back in June

Last weekend, Becky, Angie and I went back to harvest the rice...or at least to pose for lots of pictures to make it look like we harvested the rice. We didn't really harvest all that much of it, truth be told.
Once again, Emiko was the perfect hostess, preparing a huge meal of traditional Japanese dishes. Emiko and her husband have an absolutely gorgeous, very traditional looking house out in the country (in the town where Angie lives).
Mitsuko, one of the other students in my conversation class also performed a little tea ceremony for us.
After rice harvesting, we drove to a farm in the next town to go pear-picking.
It was a sunny, but not too hot and humid, day! It has cooled off here very suddenly, and much much earlier than last year. I remember wondering in late October of last year (as I sweated even with the aircon on in my apartment) when on earth it was going to finally change from summer to fall (which didn't happen until November). But this year it was cooling down by the time I came back from Canada in early September! It has been a pleasant 22-25 degrees all month! However, this is causing all the rice fields to be finished much earlier than they should be, and some of the trees seem to be just dropping their leaves without the leaves having changed colour (they just die, turn brown and fall off). I'm keeping my fingers crossed that we'll still get some nice fall colours later on from other kinds of trees. It is nice to have cool weather, though!


TEA:

whisking the tea

RICE:







Emiko's daughter said she doesn't like to go in the ricefield because she's afraid of frogs. We were told that they get picked up along with the rice stalks by the harvesting machine and then die inside the bags of rice, so no one likes them. There were loads of them in the field!



Most rice isn't harvested by hand these days. This is the machine they use for harvesting (modelled by Becky in my hat).


Emiko's daughter, Marie, in one of the harvested fields.


bugs



LUNCH:
Itadakimasu!



PEARS:









If you click on this picture of Angie, you can see that all the pears have been pre-bagged while still attached to the trees to keep them from being eaten by bugs.


Too stuffed to move!


Behind us you can see grapes, which have also been pre-bagged.