Another Wonderful Weekend

I just have to say first that in less than a week, I’ll be on a ferry bound for South Korea.  *happy dance*  I can’t wait!  We’ve got everything planned out, and all we’re waiting on is for Sunday to get here so that we can go!  GAAAAAAAAHHHH!!!  I can’t wait for this weekend!!!

And speaking of weekends…..Ian and I counted up our remaining weekends in Japan.  The total is thirteen, but two of those are going to be spent in South Korea, so we really only have eleven more weekends left to play around with.  Out of those eleven weekends, four are during the month of June, meaning that the rainy season weather will probably restrict any fun activities to indoor only.  That only gives us seven more weekends to play around with.  Even then there are some required activities that will tie up some of those weekends, such as my school sports day on May 12th.  Since our weekends—our time to get out and explore, hike, take day trips, etc—are rapidly dwindling, Ian and I decided that we need to start making the most of them……without killing ourselves or making us too tired to start the week.  We started making a list of things that we want to do before leaving Japan.  It’s a realistic list.  We know that we’re not going to make it up to Hokkaido or back down to Okinawa before we leave, so there’s no need to put those things on the list.  Items include:

-camping on the beach again

-hiking Ichifusa one more time

-hiking in the Ebino plateau again

-taking the scenic route from Hitoyoshi to Ebino

-enjoying the beach at Aoshima

-taking the 219 from Yunomae to Aoshima (It’s a BEAUTIFUL drive)

-swimming in our swimming hole in Yunomae

-enjoying an entire day picnicking along the Kumagawa

-re-visiting the suspension bridge place in Mizukami at sunrise to take pictures

The list isn’t complete, but these certainly are a few things that we’d like to do before time gets away from us.

With all of that being said, here’s how we spent this past weekend.  On Friday night, we invited everyone over for a pancake party.  SO MUCH SUGAR WAS CONSUMED.  We slathered pancake after pancake with cream, strawberries, chocolate, peanut butter, nutella, bananas, syrup, or any combination of the above.  It was great to have everyone over.  We didn’t play a game or watch a movie or anything.  Instead we spent the entire night talking about anything and EVERYTHING.  I don’t know if any subject was missed!  And bonus from that night: the lone M & M was eaten!  I jokingly offered it to Melissa, and she popped it into her mouth without giving it a second thought.  I stared at her with bugged eyes, and she said, “Dude, I know what that M & M meant.  I read your blog.”  Ha!

Saturday would have been the perfect day to scratch one of those items off of our to do list, but it rained pretty much the entire day.  I washed three loads of clothes that morning and hung them out so that they could dry.  I knew that it was supposed to rain, but it was so nice and breezy outside that I thought they could hang out for a little while.  When the first drops of rain started falling, I leaped off the bed, ran outside, and gathered everything off of the line before the downpour came. 

Since it rained all day, Ian and I took the opportunity to have a lazy day.  We curled up in bed and watched TV for most of the afternoon.  Ian dozed off around 4PM, but I got up and tackled the HUGE stack of dirty dishes leftover from Friday night’s party.  Ian finally stirred awake a few hours later, and we took on the task of switching our closet from winter to summer clothes. 

I always love doing this….especially since summer clothes take up less space.  Summer clothes are much more fun and vibrant!  We went through our clothes, discarding any winter clothes that we didn’t want to take back with us.  For a few hours it looked like a tornado had blown through our house because there were clothes and cardboard boxes SCATTERED EVERYWHERE.  For the past couple of months, if any package came, we kept the cardboard box for packing purposes.  Now we have amassed enough boxes that we could probably make a cardboard fort.  However, we were able to fit ALL of our winter clothes into one box!  Woot!!  Granted, that box is INCREDIBLY HEAVY, and we’ll need to tape the heck out of it before we send it.  One thing that really helped us reduce space was a vacuum bag.  We bought one at Daiso the other day for this purpose.  It was actually really cool to watch…….  Once we had stuff the bag as full as possible, we vacuumed all of the air out of it, reducing the bag’s size in half! 

Now that our winter clothes are packed away, we’re one step closer to coming home!  We want to get those clothes in the mail sometime this week so that they can take the slow train home.  If you send packages by ship instead of air mail, it takes a couple of months to reach its destination, but it’s MUCH cheaper, and it’s not like we’ll need our winter clothes anytime soon!

Alright, I’m going to stop here……even though I still have Sunday to go…because Sunday was quite a busy day for us and deserves its own special blog.