Neighborly Visits

We all slept late today, waking up at 8:30 am, the kids had cereal for breakfast and Yasuko and I had coffee and toast. The kids went outside to play. The weather is cloudy and windy with the sun trying to peek through, the temperature feels to be about high 40's low 50's.. not too bad.

Maskawa-san our neighbor stopped by and told us that her oldest daughter Yu (10) is away with her Dad in Otaru, which is about a 3 hour drive from here, and will not be back until Tuesday, she thought she was going to be off of work, but was unexpectedly called in, and asked if we could keep an eye on Ibuki (8) and Mu (6), she will not get home until 9:30 pm. They live in the other half of the duplex we live in.

We took them and our kids to the natural spring nearby and collected some fresh water, the water in our tap is good also, but you get the metallic taste sometimes because of the pipes, but the spring water is so good, and is great to make rice and coffee with. The kids had fun throwing rocks into the nearby river, and the mountains were just beautiful, of course I forgot my camera again, but we live only 5 minutes away so I will go back to take some pictures. We need to buy a bigger container to hold more water, right now we are using 2 liter drink containers that we have emptied.

After lunch we took a trip into town and made sure the other neighbors knew about Ibuki and Mu, we went to a combination dollar store, grocery store and clothes store and book store, it is in a 3 story building, one stop shopping at it's finest. It was raining when we got finished and the wind is blowing like crazy.

We got back around 7:00 pm, and called our neighbor Fujita who is going to help us with our Internet connection, they came over and talked over coffee while the kids played with legos, apparently the second terminal adapter is also very old, and we cannot find drivers for it, so it looks like we are going to have to shell out the $100 to buy a new one, Oh Well, we sure gave it a good shot to try and get on for Free.

In another week is the Japanese Holiday "Golden Week" and we are going to go with Fujita -san on a picnic with both family's to a park where the kids can have fun and the adults can have fun also. Fujita-san is also going to take us to an electronic store where we can buy a new terminal adapter, so the Internet is going to have to wait another couple of weeks.

The Fujita family went home at 9:00 pm and we quickly had dinner and got the kids into bed, it was a late night for all of us.