It was a good day...

I had a really good Saturday this past weekend. Dave and I woke up early to start our respective days - I was heading to my first washi ningyo (Japanese paper doll) making class in Seki and Lord Blackwood was off to play paintball in Mie-ken with a bunch of socialites from the Gifu/Seino areas. I was pretty stoked at the prospect of doing some bonafide Japanese arts and crafts and set out in my car to make the 1 hour drive. The class lived up to my expectations and then some. A gang of rag tag gaikokujin (foreigners) descended upon the home of the very amiable Chisako-san, a radiant Japanese woman who has been teaching doll classes, mostly to foreigners in English, for about 5 years. One look around her war room, and it's obvious that she is a master in the way of the doll. There were five students in total and she helped us create dolls as beautiful and unique as each of us. The doll I made was called the Temari, which translates to a ball wound tightly with colourful threads, which is what my doll is holding. It took us about 3 hours to make our masterpieces (made entirely out of paper) and we stopped about three-quarters through to break for lunch. We headed to a nearby Italian restaurant that had real bread to dip in real olive oil and I was in heaven. The pasta was pretty Japanesey, as was the dessert, but the bread, oh the bread, how it made up for it.

The class itself was definitely pleasurable for me. I'm not a very crafty girl, though I knit as a hobby and can be creative when inspired, so this was a real treat for me. Already, I feel that washi ningyo making will be a definite highlight of my time in Japan and I intend of making Chisako-san's class a priority for me.

Saturday was also a good day because I saw a battalion of monkeys in a field. It was awe-some. At first, as I was passing by, I thought they were statues because they seemed to be frozen, but I quickly realized they were in fact quite alive, so I reversed on the 1 lane road, stopped my car and put my hazards on and stared in wonder and amusement. I also cursed myself for not having my camera with me. BLAST! I took a few crappy pics on my cell phone camera, but they were less than inspiring. I learned a very good lesson that day - always have my camera on me.

Later on in the day, I hooked up with the crew and inspected their gruesome bruises from paintball. D-dawg had a particularly nasty one on his stomach, but unfortunately, I didn't think to pick up my camera to capture the heinous wound. I also didn't think to document a particularly hair-raising experience on Friday night. After I returned home from a welcome/goodbye enkai (party), I was getting to take a shower when I noticed something black and very fast zip by. Since I had just taken off my glasses, I was as blind as a field mouse so ran to my bedroom to get my specs. Armed with vision, I cast my eyes in the direction of where the thing ran to. To my shock and horror. I recognized the intruder to be a spider. A large, large spider. I screamed and hacked, yelling for David to come and save me from the beast. After much screaming, jumping up and down on the bed, near tears and a couple of false hits, my hero slayed the arachnid and deftly cleaned up the carcass and its entrails from my tatami mat*. It took me some time to recover from this incident, but I'm on the mend as I valiantly slept in my bed last night.

Since I've realized that I've been slacking on taking photos, I will be more consistant with photographing everything from the mundane to the exciting. I intend on leaving Japan with quite a few scrapbooks and for that I've got to keep snapping.

I'm out.

* While I'm usually a very truthful writer, the intimate facts of this story had to be changed to protect the innocents. I will say, however, I was not the only one screaming on that fateful night.