Koen

Koen mean park in Japanese.  We ventured to a new park yesterday.  One of Seth's coworkers in the English department at Tsuda mentioned that there is a group of people who get together once a month at a park a couple of trains away.  The group consists of about 15-20 people (like 6-8 different families) all English speaking from various counties.  There were some from Sweden, Australia, Germany, and the United States.  They get together once a month to hang out and visit and have a picnic.  So we packed a lunch and headed out.

When we got to the park we weren't sure where Lisa and her group was so we decided to walk around and look.  At one point we saw a white man with a little girl and we thought we should follow them haha.  Well we were right! We met the two families that were there already and started to eat.  The two families were both Americans who came over to teach for a year and never left, they've been here for 14 and 16 years! Apparently these families have been getting together for years, at first they would get together and talk about the woes of childhood but now that their children are older they get together and drink while the children play!

Seth ended up going to the 7/11 across the street because we needed more food and drinks

The park had a stream where kids were fishing and searching for crawdads.  They were tiny but still one of the kids got pinched!

Here's a picture of the picnic group

 

It was an interesting group of people.  The red head standing up didn't stop talking the entire time she was there and had one of those high pitched cartoon voices.  She is a college professor and talked about the difficulties of remembering students and that she just stumbled upon the idea of having her students use note cards to practice for a presentation....really?

It was also interesting that most of the families have been in Japan for at least 12 years and some up to 26 years.  Yet when you ask them how is there Japanese all said, "eh not good, enough to get by".  You would think living in a country for that many years you would be at least mostly fluent.

Anyway, Marley learned, kinda, how to jump rope and throw a frisbee!

Then a group of people around my age or so sat down near us.  We could see from where we were that they had an animal on a leash.  It kept going under their blanket so we figured it was a small dog.  It wasn't until we went to play frisbee with Marley that we got a good glimpse of the leashed pet.

It was a Bunny!!