Hiroshima Holiday – Second Day Farming

This was probably the most fun day of the whole trip! And also the most painful, but I’ll get to that! 😛

Today the bell and announcement went off as usual, but we also had bonus washing machine noises! The one right next to the window-walls was on around 6.30am. Alas. Breakfast was the usual, but today I started my putting cold things in warm soup and it worked out. Sadly one of the girls had to go home today so she couldn’t come with us to the day’s fun outing. We went to somewhere called Sera Winery which was mostly fun for the shop and the Dream Park, which was amazing fun!

 

We started the day with some more clearing of the bus place first, Shimohara finally gave us some proper instructions and we realised he wanted absolutely everything gone, not just the one pile of bamboo he pointed to the day before. This actually turned out to be really fun! It seemed that it was some kind of old polytunnel place so the whole floor (under the crazy amounts of random plantlife) was covered in plastic! We had to rip this all up and stick it in a big pile which ended up being about the size of a car. Now I love breaking things up with all my strength; I think in my past life I was a wrecking ball, so I really enjoyed grabbing plastic and yanking it repeatedly or sawing through the thousands of bamboo roots which had grown under, round, through and over it. It was quite something actually, the was the roots had gotten into it. We also got to use all the new-looking bamboo to make a huuuuge fire! Bamboo makes huge bangs when you burn it so when we put the new logs on we had to avoid being shot at! It really did shoot hot air and smoke at you! Sadly I didn’t get many photos but here are the few I did:

Some non-bamboo roots that had formed a carpety thing!

Building the giant bamboo fire

You can see the beginnings of the plastic pile by the hut

flaaaaaames

Happy with our efforts

Going back to the house in the truck

I appear to be turquoise today.

Lunch time came around and we all made onigiri together and put them together with some chopsticks in a big container to take as lunch to the park. Firstly we went to the winery. It was cool, but pretty derelict. There was barely anyone there and it looked like it was still waiting for things to be built! The shop was cool though, they had loads of wine flavoured things; from tea and jam to sweets and bread! They also let you sample the wine which was really tasty surprisingly! I’m not a huge fan of wine but the sweet one was delicious.

Trying some wine

Cheers!

The shop

The wine stand

Outside the shop

The courtyard

For some reason they had a Thomas land! Japan seems to love Thomas Lands…

There was a part where you could check out the processes

The entrance is shaped like a wine bottle!

I should mention by the way that there were 6 of us and only a five seater car. Guess who ended up lying across everyone in the back seat! Lovely and safe. Good fun though, riding in a car is quite different when you’re horizontal! After the winery we headed off to the park. Sadly it was raining and quite windy but we had a great time anyway! It made eating lunch quite hard with stuff blowing all over but it was tasty none-the-less. We had pringles, onigiri, onion soup and some sweeties. Then Shimohara had to go and tend to something and said he’d be back so we went and played! There was no one else there and we had the place to ourselves. We went to the crazy playpark bit first, but the main attraction was the huge slides on the hill! They were something like flumes and in the rain they were utterly deadly. They had no ending bit to slow down so we all just shot off the end and either landed on our bums or rolled over! I went down twice as did the guy we were with, but I sort of wish I didn’t!

Transport mode

Lunch!

Nom nom

The play park bit

I came to find Bekah trapped on the spinny thing!

Yzzy had jumped off and seemed pretty dizzy!

cave…?

A BALL POND IN A PARK! Genius.

Ball wars

Like being 5 again 🙂

The ball pond hut

Asparagus…? It seemed very farm themed… Maybe to get the kids started from an early age? “You remember how much you loved asparagus at the dream park Jimmy? NOW FARM IT!!”

Very sad looking cows with some happy people

Moo

Piggies

Grapes and some other things

god knows how you ride this but I gave it a go. It became a balance game for me

The view from the hill to the slides

Up to the top

View of the park from the top

SLIDES!!!

There was no such thing as stopping

Wee!

Bekah looking terrified

He shot himself down so fast!

This is the reason I regretted the second slide down!

Random fish on the way out

 

So some very wet bums, sore hands and happy smiles later, we had to go. Thankfully, we got taken to a hot spring place which had a warm-room where we sat for a couple of hours to dry. We sat in front of the heater and also had some crazy massages from those chairs you put a few bob in.

The warm room

Thankfully we didn’t have to do any more work that day which was great. We hid ourselves in the kotatsu (the warm table) and started booking our hostel for the second half of the holiday. We also took Fuku-chan for a walk around and through a shrine which was fun! After dinner Yzzy gave us all some matcha Kit-Kats which are bright green and delicious, and Bekah gave us some sakura tea that she’d bought in the winery. We chatted for a while and went to bed about 10pm!

Hiding from the coooollldddd

Walking the dog; entrance to the shrine

Many stairs later we got to the pretty part

Matcha Kit-Kat and Sakura tea

That’s the end of day two, but I’ll part with a bonus picture of this little light-pull guy:

Hiroshima Holiday – First Day Farming

On our first day farming we planned to be up for 7.30am, ready for an 8am breakfast. But the room we were in had more nasty surprises for us than just the two, single-glazed glass outside walls in close to freezing temperatures! At 6am, the city wide morning alarm went off. It sounded like the speaker was facing into the room and about 2 foot from the window-walls it was so loud! That wasn’t fun, and what’s more, just as I’d fallen back asleep, at 6.30am an announcement went off! Suffice to say that was not the best start to the day. I phoned Mitch at about 7.55am which was nice though. Then Shimohara came and asked us to help with the rice. So Bekah, Yzzy and I went to dish out rice and take trays to everyone. This became something us three had to do every meal for the duration so we got used to it by the end.

Sadly I already have another thing to moan about! The meals he served were very traditional. I had stated on the website we applied through that I will not eat fish and I told the man I hate fish but every single meal was fish. And he somehow also managed to hit on the other thing I hate; raw veg. So I skipped the raw cabbage, raw broccoli, fish heads and other random things he often put on there and just ate the plain rice and whatever warm soup there was. Occasionally when there was cooked but cold broccoli I put it in the soup to warm it up. I did that with the cold omelette too. Twice I even gave the fish a go, so I did try! To be honest I was usually quite full on the soup and rice so it wasn’t a huge problem. It just became a bit much by the end of it to come in nackered and have your dinner cold and looking back at you!

 

But enough about food! Now I have told you I’ll not dwell on it in further blogs. The first thing we did that day was collect the burnt rice husks that Shimohara sells as fertiliser. It was strange to see; he burns them in tanks overnight and then pours them on the ground in the morning and stuffs them into plastic bags to sell. So we had a go and filled quite a few bags. We discovered that Shimohara is a man of few words, even though 4 of the 6 of us spoke Japanese; he wouldn’t give us proper instructions and often just made hand gestures. But the others who had been there a while knew what to do.

The blue bags are the rice shells ready to burn and the silver tanks are what he burns them in. Then the black floor is where they get poured to cool and then we scoop them up.

 

Once we had done this, we went over the other side of the road (in the background where the bus is in the above photo!) and started work there. It was good fun, we basically were cleaning this big patch of ground that had been nothing more than a junk yard for some years it seemed. Yzzy and Bekah were asked to shovel some manure to a patch that had already been sorted and the others and I got told to move a huge pile of bamboo and burn it all. He didn’t really give any of us detailed instructions though so we had to go back the next day and continue on! It was a fun job though so I didn’t mind. There was a very cool old rusty bus too so I had fun taking some photos of that.

Bekah and her poo shovelling, burning in the background

One of the many crazy things we found; a box of horror movie style bits and bobs!

Horror box close up

Random sink…

Burn!!

The back of the cool bus

Front

My favourite thing was the way it had a bamboo forest backdrop!

We had a 2 hour lunch break which started with Japanese curry. I was pretty excited to be eating something other than fish until I realised it had fish in it. And it was cold. Oh well! I got to go out and play with the dogs and the goats for a little while which was great! They’re very funny. I felt very sorry for them though, they were all chained or in small pens and weren’t allowed to roam. Which seemed odd for a farm with so much space.

Lunch

They had loads of bunnies in flowerpots all over

A pano from where I sat on a rock in front of the house and called Mitch

Fuku-chan the cute little puppy

Smiley goat!

This one was very nibbly, it was cute

Boo

Everytime you approached Fuku-chan he’d strain like this, it was cute but sad >.<

Yzzy saying hi

After lunch it was weeding time. It was nice to do something relaxing for a bit, until we’d been doing it for hours! Ask my dad, I have never been much of a weeder 😛 Bekah and Yzzy really enjoyed the calm meditate-y work and the rest was good. We made a frog friend half way though and finished about 6pm.

Froggie friend!

Plenty to do

All smiles

and giggles

We had dinner around 7pm, showered (which was lovely!) and stretched out before bed. I slept like a log until the next announcement!