Family visit

I’ve got my mum and two older sisters visiting at the moment. They’ve only been here four days but already we’ve packed in a punishing schedule:

• On Thursday, I picked them up at lunchtime and took them straight up good old Mt. Fudekageyama, the one where I took all those photos of sunrise and cherry blossoms.
• On Thursday night we tried to go out for a meal of — what else — okonomiyaki, but the local restaurant was closed so we ended up going to a nearby place that turned out to serve tasty cheap food and is our new favourite restaurant. I love it when that happens.
• On Friday Ruby got to take the day off school to open her birthday presents (including a pair of headphones with microphone for the iPod which unleashes the potential for a whole new swag of apps that involve singing, such as the Glee auto-harmonizer; Ruby could be heard warbling in the background for the rest of the day) and then, seeing as it was such a lovely hot day, we all went down to test out the local beach. In the afternoon I took the visitors for a spin down the coast to visit my cafe of the moment Cafe Hoxton and take in Ye Olde Townne of Takehara which has a very well-preserved Old Bit. We stumbled across it quite by accident when we were driving through Takehara one day but had to hurry back home for some reason that escapes me, and I had been looking forward for some months to exploring the area at a more leisurely pace, so it was the perfect opportunity to do just that.
• Friday night was the official birthday dinner for Ruby at the local onsen. The mother of one of Ruby’s friends works there and had arranged a surprise in the form of a chocolate cake, so we feasted on dinner and cake while gazing out at the views of the inland sea. Highly convivial.
• On Saturday morning I took Felix to soccer practice which as luck would have it is just near a rather fine temple complex called Buttsuji (the kids think this name is hilarious; can’t imagine why). I like this place not so much for the temple but because it’s in a lovely shady mountain patch with a stream running through it that is reminiscent of the Dandenongs back in Melbourne (only with more Kulture, obviously). I forgot to take any pictures but this photo shows my favourite part of the complex where you walk along next to the lanterns.
• On Saturday afternoon I took my two sisters (mother having officially retired hurt with a sore foot) on the ferry over to Ikuchijima, the next island across from here, to see Kosanji temple (two temples in the same day; that’s a record for me) which features, among other things, a huge expanse of imported Italian marble from Carara including hills and pathways and all manner of weird and wonderful sculptures. Once again, we’d visited it months before with the kids but hadn’t had time to check it out properly. The marble is just the craziest thing: in this unprepossessing town on a tiny island in southern Japan there’s this enormous white world of stone. What on earth was that monk thinking? Still, it’s an experience, and there’s even a cafe made out of marble which we duly visited. Inside there was a genuine espresso machine and I had high hopes of a decent cafe latte but tragically it was not to be.
• On Saturday night we eventually satiated our desire for okonimiyaki. All agreed that it was the best food in the world in space and that my description of it was not at all over the top. Or not much, at any rate.
• On Sunday we took the visitors down to Onomichi which has lots of temples and culture, although they ended up spending most of the morning wandering through the local shopping arcade, the one where Felix and I had the bunsen burner coffee last week. At lunchtime we watched Felix play soccer combined with mud-wrestling, then for lunch we went to our favourite sushi place, the one where if you place an order the little plates come out to you on a special Shinkansen train. We ordered a whole lot of things that were already circulating on the conveyor belt, just so we could show our visitors the special train. (Also you get fresher sushi that way, since they have to make it right then and there. Although if you tried this on too often I suspect the chefs might be tempted to spit quietly on your plate before sending it out.)

So it’s been an action-packed four days that’s for sure. The wonderful thing about having visitors is that you get to go to places that the kids are bored with, such as Mt Fudekageyama (the mere mention of it brings groans of disapproval), Takehara (even worse) and Buttsuji (smirks plus disapproval). Plus there are the inevitable serendipitous discoveries along the way, such as the local restaurant that turned out to be quite good. (I often remember fondly how we went on the Tram Restaurant in Melbourne once when we had Japanese friends to visit. We would probably never have done it otherwise. It may be the height of dagginess but it’s actually great fun.)

And tomorrow we’re off on the ferry for an all-day island-hopping jaunt in the Eggbeater. The action just never stops here at Sunami-by-the-sea…