Grand Adventures and Household Chores
Reflections on our family’s adventures as we live, work, and play around the world
We deliberately timed our stay in Kyoto to coincide with cherry blossom season. The blossoms themselves are lovely, but at least as enjoyable as the flowers is watching other people appreciate them. Strolling and looking at trees (or picnicking underneath them) seems to be an activity in itself, and almost everyone stops to pose for photos, sometimes dressed in traditional Japanese clothes.
As I’ve written before, this is a month without external childcare, which means less time to explore solo. I still really wanted to take a cooking class in Kyoto, so I decided to bring Theo to the bento box class at Cooking Sun. (Their registration form let me add a child under five for free so I took them at their word that preschoolers were okay.)
Continue reading “A Kyoto Cooking Class – With A Preschooler”
Theo and I walked to the local rice shop, only to find it closed. (Boo.)
Luckily, in front of the rice shop we found a rice vending machine. (Yay!)
It’s starting to warm up now, but when we first arrived in Japan, it was pretty chilly! Luckily, our house-for-a-month is full of interesting devices to keep us warm.
Saturday was warm and sunny, so we started the day with lunch by the river and then rented some bicycles for further explorations. Kyoto is an amazing city for bicycling:
We rented bikes from this shop and were very happy: two reasonable bicycles and a child seat for less than 13 USD for a day.
Our hosts moved this lizard from their house to the garden, where Theo and I were playing. The lizard was very still, probably hoping that we would go away. Theo declared that he was going to watch until it moved.
Tō-ji is a Buddhist temple that was built in 796. It’s grounds include a five-story wooden pagoda that is often used as a symbol of Kyoto.
Our host Momoko has a friend in the neighborhood who performs tea ceremonies and was kind enough to host us. Tea ceremonies are pretty extensively documented, and I’m not an expert by any means, so I will mostly just relay our experiences.
The ceremony was held in a tea house, a separate, smaller structure from the main house, with a view of the garden.
One of the nicest things about our stay near Kyoto, Japan were our AirBnB hosts, who lived in a separate living space within the same house as us. They frequently sent over food, toys, books, and offers of rides, and chatting with them in the garden while Theo played was lovely and informative. In several ways, they acted as month-long grandparents to Theo, from taking him on walks to gathering scrap lumber and tools to feed his creation impulses.
As we made our way from Kyoto to Oiso, Brian and Theo played Kerbal Space Program on the Shinkansen bullet train. (I worked and looked out the window, but it’s harder to make an interesting post title out of that.)