"A Picnic At The NTT Tower."
Friday 12 October. Day 78. Perfect weather for picnicking.
Bathing, as always, began our day.
Then there was breakfast. Rice and other Japanese things. Bacon and egg. A bowl of salad (lettuce, cucumber, plum tomatoes, a dressing of seame seeds (goma) and soy sauce - no oil.) All with tea or green tea.
Late in the morning, we packed the car and set off for a picnic lunch.
We drove uphill, away from the little shopping centre, leaving the cultivated fields behind. We drove uphill through a forest to a high point that could be seen from the house. The high point was surmounted by a mobile telephone tower, the NTT Tower.
Looking one way, we could see over Kanoya to Kagoshima Bay. We could pick out Toshiharu's house. Looking inland we saw Takakuma Mountain, an extensive upland area dark green because it is covered with trees. There are a few peaks rising from the mass. Takakuma is about 1500 metres high, and it takes about three hours to climb from the starting point. Ritsuko told us that when she was in Junior High School, the students had to climb Takakuma as part of a compulsory school picnic. Climbing Takakuma was part of the entrance examination for Senior High School.
We took photographs here and Shouko unpacked a beautiful picnic lunch. Rice balls, rolled eggs, "satsuma age" or fried fish cake, boiled peanuts, and other delicacies she and Ritsuko had prepared while Toshiharu was taking Colin for a walk around the nearby streets. We sat on the grass outside the telephone facility and ate.
On the way back, driving down through the forest, we briefly saw a monkey in the trees.
Later in the afternoon, we went into the main shopping centre.
In a supermarket we saw slabs of Asahi cans offered for 5680 Yen which we figured represented about $93-00. Damn! We had told Toshiharu that beer was our drink of choice, thinking it would be cheap because it is a popular drink in Japan. No wonder Toshiharu and Takao have shouchuu (with ice or flavoured with green tea) as their tipple of choice. Shouchuu is a locally made, vodka like spirit distilled from sweet potatoes.
We went upstairs in a department store and found ourselves in Shouko's boutique. Shouko runs the shop with a partner, Satomi Kato. Satomi was looking after the shop while Shouko was looking after us.
Most shops are not busy at all because of the economic depression, though a new breed of shop, the one hundred (or two hundred) yen shop, where all the stock is priced at one hundred or two hundred yen is very popular. But of course, these shops are putting an incredible downward pressure on prices: we felt things were cheaper than they had been two years before. Shouko's shop had very nice clothes, shoes and bags.