Hiroshima Holiday – 4th and Last Day Farming
Having slept in the smaller, warmer room last night, I was so refreshed and cosy in the morning! And as we now had air conditioning, we also had a nice warm room to get changed in! Breakfast was the usual, but I got a photo of this one:
After breakfast Shimohara had a very odd little panic and didn’t really explain why other than something about another job and he just left us for an hour or so. We weren’t sure if we were supposed to do anything or be ready in 10 minutes or 2 hours, so we spent a while bimbling about. When he came back we went straight out to the shovelling field, but he took the other girl to the station, and it was just the three of us today. It was much more fun to spread the pile of stuff today as there was no silent Shimohara making it feel a bit oppressive so we chatted and had some fun. He came at about 12pm and brought Fuku-chan though!
Lunch was a bit of a surprise today, we went home to change into clean(er) clothes and then drove off into town for okonomiyaki!! It’s a gorgeous food that has so many variations depending on where you eat it. Basically it consists of cabbage, noodle(sometimes), meat, pancake batter, egg and any other random bits you want in there. The Hiroshima style okonomiyaki is very layered; rather than all mixed in like some other styles. Okonomiyaki itself means something like, ‘cooked as you like’ so you are free to put anything in or on it and do it however you want! The sauce is the best part, I could eat that all day! I took step by step photos on my dying camera, so you can see exactly how ours was made 🙂 It was a lovely little village restaurant so it had a really homey feel to it, and Shimohara had clearly been there a lot!
I couldn’t finish the whole thing, it was so big! I stuffed myself as much as I could and Bekah finished the rest 🙂 We had a little coffee and a boiled sweet afterwards and Shimohara paid for it all! On the way home we stopped for petrol, checked on Shimohara’s cows (he has so many different farm things going on all over) and then got back into work gear. When we got back to spreading, a man came with a truckload to tip a new pile onto the field we had done yesterday and we ended up chatting. It turned out that his son was also at SOAS studying! Such a small world! None of us could believe it, least of all him! He kept repeating variants of ‘no way!’ over and over again! It was very funny. He was very friendly and made the job much more fun. He left to go and get another truckful and when he came back he’d brought us a bottle of coke each! We chatted some more, I asked what was in the stuff we were spreading and it turned out it was burnt fruit and veg skins etc. He was good fun!
Shimohara returned about 6pm and spread with us for half an hour. He was a man of even less words than usual at that point but I managed to get out of him that what I’d been hearing was, in fact, the music road. I thought it was, as in 2012 I had driven over one with the lady I had stayed with. It was very cool; every time someone drove over it there would come some resonating sound and if they were driving at the right speed then it would be a song!
When we got back I showered while the girls walked the dog and the goats! We had dinner and Shimohara gave us all little cloth bags for bits and bobs as a present and we gave him some lemon sherberts and a postcard. We had a nice relaxed evening and even went out stargazing a bit; I learnt quite a lot as Yzzy really loves the stars!
I’ll leave you with a bonus picture of the sunset and one of Bekah with stuff on her face!
Maisy In Japan 