wish you were here (Art Sites)

I’m trying here to catch up with what I’ve been up too but I’ll have to start with last weekend. We had to cancel planes to go to the Hiwasa sea turtle beach cleanup event we were planning to go to in Tokushima on Saturday because of the rain forecast. My older son and I went last year, cleaned up and went to the sea turtle museum on the beach near where the turtles come up and lay their eggs. Too bad we had to cancel.
So we ended up meeting some friends we were planning to go with who are from Tokushima. Without too much planning (as usual), we ended up heading toward Tokushima and looking for a place between Takamatsu and Tokushima to meet up with them. We stopped around Tsuda-no-Matsubara, much closer to Takamatsu than Tokushima (sorry). As it was not raining at the time, we played on the beach there near a large swimming area which, at this time of the year, is completely empty. Before long though, it started to sprinkle. And then it got down right rainy. It was okay though as it was about time for lunch. We headed for an Italian restaurant we had been to before, a close drive from the beach, La Fresca. My wife went in to ask about the waiting time. Between our family and our friends there would be four adults and four kids so we were not expecting quick seating. But the woman who my wife talked to responded with the less than formal and rare one word response, “MURI!”. In other words, “Forget about it!”. I thought, Okay, no tatemae there eh? So we went to someplace else.
While driving around in the now pouring rain we noticed a place on the map my wife had heard of but not been to, Ooyama Bokujou. The homemade soft ice cream she had heard about was all I needed to know about so, after eating, this was out next destination.

This place was much more than good ice cream. They had lots of homemade bread and pastries which made me regret not just coming straight to there for lunch. The little shop has a huge kitchen you can look back to. The guy working there was cutting what looked like a round of sponge cake for the bottom of a cheese cake. With the rain clearing up for a little while we walked down the road to where they keep the Jersey cows, sheep, goats and ponies. I grew up around cows (Holsteins, not Jerseys) but it had been a while and the air brought back lots of childhood memories-and made my son exclaim that it smelled, well, like you would expect it to.

I noticed this three-wheeler, something I sort of wish I could have driven around a little bit. I’ll have to ask next time if they’ll let me take it for a spin if I throw some hay around. I’ll definitely be going back with a lighter stomach to try one of the curry pastries that they make after you order it.
After saying goodbye to our friends from Tokushima, we headed home. On the walk to grandma and grandpa’s for dinner the roads were lined with flowers drenched with rain screaming for me to photograph them.

  

While talking to a guy at work who lives close to Ritsurin Koen, I heard a rumor that the park would be changing its English name to Ritsurin Garden as it’s more of a Japanese garden than a park. To me it’s clearly a matter of what part of the park you go to. Living a few train stops away and having the year round entry passport (that cost 5000 yen and gets you and two other people in anytime all year), I was in the habit of going there almost every weekend with my older son when my wife was pregnant with number two and wasn’t up for going out to “do stuff”.
In my mind, if you go in the main gate and go toward the right side of the park there are lots of “Japanese Garden” areas but there is also a big open space with a nice big tree in the middle, some benches and some monuments: a park. Perfect for morning picnics or Hanami in the spring. However, the scene of the garden cradled by Mt. Shuin that opens up as you walk in along the broad path from the main entrance is unmistakably a Japanese landscaped garden. And most of the park to the left is more of what I think of as a Japanese garden than park too.
Regardless, my three year old son loves the place. My wife and I have to be careful about mentioning it becuase, if he hears its name, he reads it as an instant promise that we are going and we will never hear the end of it. So we have to talk in code and often call it by an alternative reading of the Kanji with the same meaning, Kuribayashi (Chestnut Forest). The main selling point for him are the dango sold at a couple places in the park. He loves settling down to a skewer of dango and a rod of dry baked fu for feeding the Koi.

I like that too but, more than the defrosted dango, I like the places built in the garden made to sit down and have a cup of macha tea while looking out over the garden. The last time I went with the family, we stopped by the smaller of the two main tea houses in the garden, the Higurashi-tei (not pictured here), for some informal tea and sweets. This tea house overlooks a small garden but the woodwork of the building itself draws my attention as much as the views of the garden. For taking tea here we got a free entry pass to the bigger, main teahouse, the Kikugetsu-tei that overlooks the south pond (following two pictures). This is a much more elaborate place that, I think, is best appreciated when visited in each season. The park is so big and accommodates so many different types of trees and flowers that it seems like every month there is something new in bloom, completely changing the scene and showing you new niches of the park that you overlooked the month before. I must have been there a hundred times now, early in the morning before the tour buses pull in, and I amazed to always find something new.
  

Last Saturday was a great day for being outside. I spent about 15 minutes fingering through my book of 50 mountains in Kagawa and decided to set out for Doyama (堂山). After persuading my wife that our older son could handle it and promising to shoulder our one-year-old up and down the mountain, she agreed to come along. Doyama is classified as a Satoyama situated pretty much in the middle of the Sanuki plain that reaches up 304 meters. The approach is pretty rough for our three-year-old. The hardest part for him was that his little brother was getting a free ride in the carrier that he used to get to ride around in. But once we got to the first major stop along the top and ate lunch he was ready to go. The first place that seems like the top is marked by a little box sized shrine called Ryuogu (龍王宮) on an clearing with some benches and a very nice view. While eating the box lunch she made, I joked with my wife how the shrine, “Dragon King Palace” sounded like the name of a Chinese restaurant. There’s also a box there with notes and pictures of a group that climb it every morning to watch the sunrise. This is obviously a very popular mountain with the locals.
However there was still about an hour’s walk to the real top of the mountain. I figured this would be easy as it seemed to be just walking across the top of the range. But there were a lot of steep up and down parts of the trail, even a part with a rope for getting up and down. I came across a non-poisonous looking snake on the side of the trail but that was about all the wild animals I saw. Of course the birds were going crazy singing and there were harmless looking spiders that looked like daddy long legs (without the long legs) all over. There was one opening along the trail to the top that gave a really great view of the valley going down the side of the mountain. This is what I came for. I took some pictures but none that capture the scale or feeling so you’ll have to find out for yourself what it’s like. I have no doubt you'll recognize it when you come to it.
We made it to the top but with all the trees there wasn’t much of a view from there. Heading back, we started seeing other climbers. The one-year old took his afternoon nap in while riding down the mountain and I broke down and carried our older son for about ten minutes of steep steps.
Other than the mountain itself, at the bottom there is a shrine called Tsunashiki Tenmangu. I haven’t looked into the history of this one too much but I read on the plaque there that it got its name (which I translate into “Hammock Tenmangu” ) from a story about the creation of a hammock made out of fishing ropes for Sugawara no Michizane when he was passing through here on his way to Kyushu after exile. Also at the bottom, down the road from the shrine, is a Temple called Shoukei-ji (正花寺) that houses an “Important Cultural Asset”, a wooden Bosatsu statue made in the Nara period. The temple looked to be in need of some care and despite the notice of the statue on the plaque, there didn’t seem to be anybody around to show it to you.
All around this was a great mountain and I really enjoyed spending the day on it.
Getting there by train is easy enough you just get off at Okamoto Station on Kotoden’s Kotohira line and follow the mountain trial guides directions from there. If going by car, you go south on route 32 past the Nariai Nishimura Joy and take one of the last right turns before passing the Okamoto Station.
  

Today was the last day of the Golden Week vacation for me. We spent most of the vacation time in Kyoto and visiting Nara one of the days. We managed to avoid getting caught in any traffic jams by leaving before the weekend and driving back at night before the last day of vacation. On the way back though, the opposite lane was completely jammed most of the way!
For the last day of Golden week, we woke up to it raining and thinking it would rain the rest of the day but, fortunately, it didn’t. While our one year old took his morning nap I took our older three year old for a drive to the local Koi dealers, Mr. Miyatake’s place to talk Koi and ask about the latest problems my father in law is having with his Koi. We got back and ate lunch and met up with the rest of the family, my wife, one year old, and the grandparents.
As the weather was looking good, we (excluding my wife) decided to go climb a mountain. So following Grandma’s directions, we ended up at the foot of Dakeyama (嶽山) which, from the map I have, looks to be in Miki-cho. Like most of the mountains in Kagawa it’s not that tall but this one certainly has a tall mountain feel to it. At 204.7 meters it only takes about 30 minutes to get to the top, but don’t underestimate this mountain. Once you get to the top, your on this narrow ridge that feels like it just drops off on both sides. This is not the place to take a couple one and three year-olds that like to push each other around. One wrong step and there you go rolling down the side of the mountain!
But as it's bare rock at the top, the 360 degree view is really nice. We could see Sunport and Yashima to the North and, to the South East, Nyotai-san (女体山), Mt. Woman Body.
After getting down safely using the repelling chain that connects posts along the path, we found a couple four leaf clovers. This is the biggest one I think I’ve ever seen.
As it was too late to start preparing for dinner at home we ended up deciding to eat out somewhere in the neighborhood. Okonomiyaki was the popular vote and so we stopped at place called Jozen. It’s kind of on the end of a rice field like a lot of places in Ota that border the undeveloped rice fields. It’s about the fourth time I’ve been there and every time we go they are playing jazz. So it was Sonny Rollins and Okonomiyaki tonight. Before it was mostly Mingus.
A busy last day to a busy Golden Week.