Dolly 18th anniversary...

Happy Doll's Festival!

This is the Prince and Princess (who has very unruley hair...somehow fitting really)...with some sugar candies, an origami plate and a box of pink mochi rice wrapped in cherry leaves.

March 3 is Doll's Festival in Japan, when families with daughters display dolls at home - and all the supermarkets get giddy with pink and white food.

It's also the anniversary of me coming to Japan in 1992....in my thin cotton clothes and suntan from the beaches of thailand...and deciding to stretch out the world travelling for...just 1 more year by getting an english teaching job in the tokyo suburbs.

and here i am.18 years later. job. man. man's mother and 2 heavy kittens sitting on me now, so i cant reach the capital letter key...

i celebrated by going to a hot spring village with yujiro cos he was teaching at the nearby ski hill. while and his hongkongese customers braved the snow...i sat in hot water and wondered in all the rocks in onsen in japan are actually real rocks....or concrete covered with blue/red/beige/green spray on fake rock...

on the way home we bought doll festival stuff for dinner - colored rice, good crab dumplings, salad etc...it looked all very pretty....

and okaasan of course didnt come home until almost 8 pm again...and SHE'D bought stuff too...and we had already eaten...so i had to put some of our stuff away so she could eat her stuff....and she had eaten at 3 pm...so wasnt so hungry...

oh....frustrating....specially when i tried to make a nice event dinner for her and us...her lousy sense of time of day buggers it up....

i had to put on a smile and pretend it didnt matter...but it makes me feel i dont want to bother planning nice dinners if she is just going to come late...

so. that is life after 18 years in japan. so mysterious and exotic....

thesecats are tpp heavy. i have to stop now.