Mayberry, Japan
Welcome to my random musings about the world, on a weekly-to-occasional basis.
Where we are: We’re in Biei, Hokkaido (pronounced B.A.—I had to ask), but tomorrow we’re headed for the airport, and on to Bangkok to see eldest offspring for a few days. I’ll miss Japan. (I wrote this a couple of days ago.)
Mayberry, Japan
We had a particularly fun day of Rosen-style touristing yesterday.
First we went to a flower farm. We rode in a little buggy, pulled by a tractor, all around the fields. Lots of families rode with us, but weirdly, so did a lot of older couples with no accompanying children. I guess we’re those people now. Then we went to the ‘alpaca farm’ area, which is a bunch of alpacas in a pen, clamoring to be handfed some choice salad. We didn’t feed them, but the other elderly folks seemed really into it. One lady got spat on by an alpaca because it could see the lettuce, but she wasn’t fast enough to hand it over. I might’ve giggled.
Then we went back to the fields full of flowers, which were legitimately gorgeous. We wandered around taking a bazillion photos of poppies, bellflowers, lavender, dianthus, sunflowers—a patchwork of color spread across rolling hills. We watched families driving pink golf carts between the fields, stopping for photo ops. Lee said it was sort of like the agricultural part of the state fair.
For lunch, we headed to a place called—I kid you not—Potato Village. We waited about an hour to get into the restaurant, which serves basically two things: beef stew, and a potato gratin. Obviously, I had the gratin. It was delicious. I also had a salad, which was smaller than the salad I had for breakfast, but just as nice. (I also had a whole roasted sweet potato for breakfast, so apparently yesterday was potatoes-and-salad day).
After lunch we we went to see Lee’s two tourism choices: the Tree, and the Birch Path. The Tree was … wait for it … a tree. In the middle of a field. It was probably a nice enough tree, but apparently the farmer had had enough of crazy Instagram junkies traipsing through his field, because he’d put up a bunch of signs explaining (very politely) that people’s shoes might contaminate the soil with a hazardous pest or virus and ruin his crop, so please stay out. We observed the Tree from the comfort of our car.
The Birch Path was a double row of Japanese birch trees, which have beautiful tall straight trunks, with silvery white bark. This double row curved in a full circle, so we walked on the path between the two rows, in a circle. For about five minutes. And that was nice.
Then we came back to the hotel for a break. As the sun started to go down around 7, we headed out again which was noteworthy in itself, because we so rarely go out after dark. [An aside: *We go out after dark so infrequently that it’s my running joke—Oh, so THIS is what it looks like after dark! It’s been so long, I had forgotten! Lee’s running joke, of course, is to point out every time we’re out after dark—I want this noted: we’re out. It’s dark. That means we’re out after dark.
The best part of yesterday was when we were driving back to our hotel at 9 pm. Lee said, I can’t believe how dark it is out here!
Well, yes. That’s what happens when we go out after dark. It’s dark.]
Anyway, our evening adventure was in the public park in a nearby small town. The park was densely planted with lavender, and a light show plays over the purple fields for the first two weeks of July. In the middle of all this lavender, there’s a little archway with a bell; I believe every child (and some of the adults) in that park rang that bell while we were there. There were loudspeakers playing the same two slightly tinny-sounding instrumental songs over and over.
The spotlights and floodlights and super-bright Kleig lights all made for a fun show; the people enjoying the scene all seemed very happy. The dogs were well-behaved (and one whippet was very nattily dressed). We wandered and watched the lights and sniffed the flowers and watched the people. It was the summer version of one of those huge Christmas light extravaganzas.
The whole day was very wholesome and a little kitschy and completely … relatable. Everything about the day reminded me of similar days we’ve spent dragging our kids to agricultural shows, or seasonal exhibits, or even just Random Things to See, like a fish hatchery in the NC mountains, or an alligator nursery in the Everglades. I even remember some things like that from my own childhood—when my parents drove us down the curviest street in the world in San Francisco, or when we rode a glass elevator in Atlanta, because glass elevators used to be Random Things to See.
Every country Lee and I have traveled to has had these places—things that you wouldn’t fly all the way around the world to see, but if you stumble onto them, you’ll enjoy a little window into another culture.
And invariably, what I realize when I peek through those little windows, is, once again, that we’re all more alike than different.
Take care,
Lisa
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