That Heat

It's like a Michael Jackson song

In our normal weekend quest to find something new, we went to Tokiwa Park in Ube to enjoy some sun and sights. There's a large pond/small lake with many many wild swans (white, black, and everything in between), pelicans, and ducks.

We named him Kenji. Oh, and I cut my hair.

One big swan even came out of the water and hung out with us for a while, probably hoping we had some popcorn to share. Unfortunately for him we didn't and wouldn't have shared anyway. Butter is no good for swan tummies!!

In another week or so the pond will be covered in red lilies!

A large summer draw is the big iris and hydrangea (ajisai) garden which is stunning. The Boy took lots of beautiful pictures and will probably do a whole post on that later. [I posted pictures on Flickr, here, and on Facebook, here. - Brian]

I left the park nearly in tears though because of the depressing monkey exhibit across the road that looked like it was built 30 years ago with nothing but concrete and metal. No trees, no grass, no plants, but plenty of people willing to feed them disgusting potato chips and other processed snacks. I glared angrily at some of the people, and they hesitated for a moment but went right ahead and kept feeding the monkeys anyway.

It was really hard to get Boy to cooperate with this picture!

On a totally different note, it's hard to find genuinely hot peppers in the stores here. We lucked out a few days ago in finding an ornamental pepper plant for only 200 yen ($2) with a crop of yellow, orange and red inch-long, capsaicin-packing beauties. Not sure of how spicy they were, I tried a tiny piece and man, oh, man was I sorry. It burned my lips and finger for a good 20 minutes after the fact. Four peppers were sacrificed for our delicious Sweet Potato and Cauliflower Curry, courtesy of The Joy of Cooking. It's one of our favorites, so check out the link to my other blog and enjoy!