some different city in Japan. They've been going on for over 50 years, and thousands and thousands of Japanese mothers come from all over the country. It was really cool.Anyway, after the flea market we headed to the Golden Paviaian (the one that has been the desktop on my computer for the last five months). Despite the rain, it was absolutely gorgeous.
We walked around the grounds and found a place to have a traditional Japanese tea ceremony - the perfect place to duck into to get out of the rain! It was very nice and the little desert we had had a picture of the golden pavilian baked into it, and it had two tiny gold leaves on it that we ate!
Next we went to the Nijo Castle. Wow. The wole thing was surrounded by a moat, and there were two palaces inside, one of which was surrounded by yet another moat. We spent hours in the Ninomaru Palace (the Shogun's palace) it was absolutely mind blowing how intricate everything was. There were SO many incredibly interesting aspects to such simple arcitecture. I'd say the most interesting part was the floor boards. Nightingale Fooring was a kind of flooring used to alarm people of intruders. Metal cramps are fastened into little nitches under the floor boards, so when any weight is applied to the board (ie someone walking on it) it tweets like a nightingale! It was really cool because each board had a little bit different of a sound, so you could tell how fast someone is going, or how heavy they were.From the castle we hustled to teh Arashi Yama Monkey Park. Oh my goodness. It was a little bit of a hike, but those monkeys were SOOO cute!! I thought about snatching a tiny one and smuggling it home (I think they would really get along with Olive!). We got to feed them, and the best part was when a baby monkey started playing with my toes. His momma saw him when he started climbing up my leg, ran over my foot screaming, and snatched the monkey right off of me. I felt pretty special.
Then we saw some long-boats paddling down the river and stopped to see what they were up to. I was SO excited to see that they were lining up to watch an ancient practice of fishing. It was a form of fishing I learned about a few years ago in which a small flock of cormorants are tied to a boat via a metal ring around their neck. The birds go down into the water to catch a fish, and when they come up the fisherman pulls the rope they are tied to, flinging them onto the boat, and the fish they caught is forced out of their mouth into a bucket on the boat. The bird is thrown back into the water and they just go over and over again - boom, boom, boom, one after another, catching fish incredibly fast. It was really something to see. At first I felt really bad for the birds, but apparently they actually have a ranking order among them that the birds actually recognize - it seems like they really take pride in this sort of fishing.Sunday was pretty full as well around these parts. We went to a little cafe in the morning and took off for a ropes course to check it out and see if it would be ok for the day camp kids to go to for a field trip. Then we walked around the Yoyogi area for a few hours trying to find this Samuri sword musuem (everywhere we stopped to ask dirrections pointed us further and further from where we were supposed to go... very thoughtful). We finally found it, and thought it was small, it was PACKED with interesting history.
Another blog soon to tell you about this weekend (Aug 1-3). Whew!
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