Skool holidays

The spring holiday break has started! Ruby’s short-lived primary school career officially finished with the graduation ceremony on Wednesday 25th, while Felix was obliged to spend another day at school and didn’t get his taste of freedom until Thursday. School starts again on 8th April and 6th April respectively, which means that Ruby gets two weeks although Felix gets barely a week and a half, the poor thing.

Ruby’s teacher was even planning to hand out homework to the Grade Six graduates (knowing full well that there was nobody to mark it) because she was worried that they might forget things over the two week break. For heaven’s sake: you would have thought they could be allowed a bit of time off after six years of intensive study for eight hours per day. In any case the threatened homework never materialised, which saved us from any moral reservations we may have had about throwing it straight in the bin.

So we’ve been packing in the activities. On Friday we headed straight up to the nearest amusement park, called Miroku no Sato. Within the first half hour we managed to make ourselves feel ill, first on the roller coaster (Felix and I went in the backwards-facing carriage the second time round — it was fully sick, in the literal sense) and the Viking ship, which I think I can safely say that Eleni and I will never, ever be going on again.

However we recovered our equilibrium on the mini-golf, always a family favourite.

At 12:30 we had to suspend the fun to take Ruby to her first training session with the Hiroshima Sanfrecce girls’ team. The training ground was right next door to the amusement park, so after she finished at 3 pm we went back for a few more rides, just to get our money’s worth. Then on the way home, tragedy struck when we were run over by a Shinkansen — just as we were driving under a railway bridge, it hurtled overhead. OK so it didn’t actually hit the car but technically we got run over, and the opportunity for a cheap gag is just too hard to resist.

Today we went up Mt. Fudekage just down the road to see if the cherry blossoms were out yet. They weren’t, so we’ll have to go back again soon. Yes, the cherry blossom season is upon us. The delicate little things barely stay on the trees for about a week so you have to be quick, and to this end we have already scheduled in a couple of cherry-blossom viewing parties with friends. Sunami is blessed with loads of cherry blossom trees, including several at the primary school and even some along the road right above our house, so I will be able to sip tea and Admire the Cherry Blossoms from my window whilst typing away at my desk.

At the moment we have a friend staying from Nagoya, so tomorrow Eleni and the kids are taking her down to Miyajima, a cute little island over on the far side of Hiroshima city, while Daddy stays home slaving over a hot computer. Miyajima is famous for its big red tori gate, apparently one of the most photographed sights in Japan (how do you measure that anyway?). In the even we are all going to watch Adelaide play Hiroshima at the local football stadium, which presents a major ethical dilemma: Adelaide are here representing Australia and deserve our support, but they also constitute the enemy in the domestic Australian competition; meanwhile Hiroshima is our local team here in Japan. Maybe I should just stay home.

And next week we are going down to visit the local jam factory (can’t say that without thinking of Chapel St.) about 20 mins down the road, thanks to none other than my drinking and hiking buddy Mr. Nishihara, who it turns out has worked there for 40 years or something. I’m really looking forward to this as I love a good factory visit. There is even a jam-making session where you get to make pots of the stuff and take it home.

So it’s shaping up as a jam-packed (sorry) holiday period, and the kids will probably be relieved to fall back into the school routine by the time we’re finished with them. Two years in Japan may seem like ages, but given that there are only three terms in the school year and therefore only three sets of holidays, and given that the kids will invariably be lumped with tons of holiday homework (as if their brains might suddenly relapse through lack of mental exercise), we’re going to have to be organised if we want to see stuff.