Today was Christchurch’s annual
“Canterbury Japan Festival”. Canterbury
is the province we live in, and there seems to be rather a large Japanese
population here. After a lazy morning
building Legos, we drove over about 11:00, enjoying our car for one more day.
I was immediately reminded of
Japan. Namely, there were lots of
people, and I was confused about what was happening most of the time!
A large, fun, and confusing festival.
We really enjoyed ourselves, though. We saw Japanese pictures, dolls, and
clothes. We heard Japanese music on the
flute and some kind of harp. Liam, who
is captivated by “pretty dresses”, insisted we stay for the kimono fashion
show. This was quite cool, actually,
because the narrator explained the different types of kimonos and when they
would be used.
Kimonos on display.
We also had a wonderful time sampling good Japanese food. I loved it all. Liam was more mixed. We first tried Inari. Liam's reaction speaks for itself!
We tried yakitori (which he liked more), and glass noodles (even better). However, I'm afraid the biggest hit of all for him was chocolate on a stick!
They served some unusual food that we didn't try. The strangest, I think, is shown below. To understand the sign, you should know that "kranskies" are small New Zealand (and, I think, Australian) sausages usually stuffed with cheese. In an attempt to meld two cultures, someone at the festival tried to serve the following:
We came home, played for a bit, and
set off for the math department. I had
to scan in the exams of my calculus students which I graded, and we wanted to
Skype home. I do have net access in the hotel now, but we still have a finite
amount of data we can transfer, so videoconferencing is best done
elsewhere! On the way, Liam finally got
to realize another one of his goals since coming here – cleaning up “rubbish”.
Christchurch seems no less or more
dirty than, say, Ellensburg – but he has become quite eager to clean up the
rubbish on the ground. I finally got him
some disposable gloves, and he had a happy time walking to and from the math
building, picking up paper, bottles, and cans.
This slowed us down quite a bit, of course, but it’s hard to complain
when your five-year-old wants to clean up the world’s litter!
Tonight we met our next-door
neighbor. He is (I kid you not) a visiting academic named Dominic who works in
the sciences and who has come from abroad for a few weeks to teach one course at
the University of Canterbury! He is from
Cambridge, and is teaching Chemistry, but beyond this the parallels are a bit
eerie. The world’s coincidences are
wonderful.
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