Merry Christmas!

Sorry for the long absence - I left the farm for a two-week tour of Japan with my boyfriend, Eric. Kyoto, Takayama, and Tokyo! I enjoyed getting a taste of the Japan outside of ARI - Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines, big cities and quiet mountains towns, udon and mochi sweets. Japan is a beautiful country, and I'm looking forward to exploring more during my remaining nine months here.

Some things I learned about Japan:

- The Japanese are extremely generous people. When I had trouble using a public pay phone to call home, one Japanese woman spent twenty minutes helping me figure out the right calling codes! Twenty minutes! Once when we were consulting our map in Kyoto, one Japanese man stopped without being asked to see if we needed help... And the examples go on.

- If you travel with a 6'4" guy, people will come up to you in the supermarket and ask if you're American - just because, as one Japanese gentlemen said, "you're so tall!"


- Offering cheap packaged junk food at temples and shrines seems to be totally acceptable. We saw so many lovely old Buddhist stone deities surrounded by 7-11 sweets!


- Japan is not ARI. I already knew this, but it was reinforced by seeing the incredible amount of packaging that went into everything, the American-like commercial emphasis on newer and better, the constant consumption.

Now I'm back at ARI, although it's very different from the ARI I left two weeks ago. The participants have all returned to their home countries, so we (the staff and volunteers) now face a three month hiatus before the next class arrives in April. I'm hoping the slower winter pace will give me time to learn more about farming and about how ARI operates.

Merry Christmas to all!