Beautiful village

I must admit that Miyama Village is truly a great place. Right now all the leaves are changing color and so some mountains look as if they are on fire. It is breathtaking when the afternoon sun peers through the mountains into the town. It is a far cry from Chicago. Sometimes I wonder how I got here and why me? How lucky I am.
Friday was great. The kyoto-sensei from the junior high took me to the cosmo-park in Kawabe. It is just that, a simple park with a giant dome housing a really big and expensive telescope. Back in the great finacial days of the early 1990's when it seemed that the Japanese were going to buy everything on the planet they government gave many small communities millions of extra dollars to beautify their towns and villages. Kawabe decided that a good investment would to be to build a giant telescope and star gazing park. Today it is losing money, but it is a darn cool place. I was able to discover for myself a few new costellations and look through the giant telescope. I saw a double ringed nebula, it was cool.
Anywho, Kasamatsu had a two day carnival/flea market/fair and called it a Matsuri. A bunch of cool events and little stands selling food. They had the toddlers do a tricycle race, I think I might have seen some betting going on. The second cullminated in another mochi maki and tossed hundreds of mochi on to an eager crowd. Again people were covered in flour and dirt.
I finally had some real sushi at an authentic sushi restaurant in Gobo. Suppesdly there is not really any great sushi places in Gobo, but I thought this place was great anywho. It costed a ton, but was great. The sea urchin didn't taste so bad either even though it looks like snot.
As for today I helped burn brush at Sougawa Elementry school. It is illegal in Japan to burn brush and just about anything because Japan is so polluted, but the old folk in the mountains and rural areas don't care and do it anyways. I guess they figure that since they've always done it then it is ok. Anyways, we had two piles burning and burned a ton of brush and leaves. I still have some smoke in my lungs. Afterwards we placed in the smoldering fires sweet potatos wrapped in tin foil so they wouldn't burn up. These were sweet potatos that they school had grown themselves too. Then we just sat around and ate some of them. It was really relaxing and great.