A day in pictures

On a typical day at ARI:

6:00 My alarm goes off...

6:22 ... I finally finish with my snooze button routine and roll out of bed.

6:30 I rush out to the courtyard for morning exercises, the rajio taiso routine broadcast over Japanese national public radio. Five minutes of waving our arms around to cheerful commands (ichi, ni, san, shi!) accompanied by graceful piano music.

6:35 Off to morning Food-Life Work. This month, I'm part of the meal service crew, so I head to the kitchen to make breakfast. Usually soup, vegetable stir-fry, and some variation on scrambled eggs à la américain.

Acivo (India) cooking up some veggies

10:00 After breakfast and morning gathering, the day's work begins. For farm volunteers, "work" means anything from sowing spinach or transplanting broccoli, packing silage for the livestock, plowing, sorting harvested soy beans, weeding, digging trenches, collecting leaves for compost, preserving sweet potato, applying compost to the fields... Last Monday, I spent the morning helping Jil weigh the pigs.

Two-week old piglets in the kotatsu (heated) box

One-month old piglets waiting to be weighed

Jil (the Philippines) weighing the piglets

12:30 Lunch! Rice and maybe curry, stir fried vegetables, soup, delicious sweet potato tempura, or homemade udon noodles...

Spring greens tempura

1:30 Farm work continues. On Monday, we sowed potatoes in several ARI fields in town. (The German farm volunteer, Felix, was extremely excited about this day - proving that some stereotypes are true).

One of our wheat fields in town

Preparing the field for May Queen potatoes

Koki (Japan) and Felix (Germany) sowing some spuds

The view from our field (if you can look through the power lines, the mountains are gorgeous!)

Taking an afternoon tea break with hot (or at least warm...) water courtesy of our solar-cooker

5:00 I finish with the daily farm work and go back to the kitchen for my evening Food-Life Work. On Monday, we had a community gambarimasho! (let's do our best!) party to celebrate the imminent arrival of the 2010 participants. We celebrated in typical Japanese fashion by making gyoza! I like to think of gyoza (dumplings that can be steamed, boiled, or fried) as the Japanese equivalent of pizza - there are countless varieties of fillings (from the more common pork with cabbage to the more unusual tofu with cheese or beef with Korean kimchi...), it's delicious but not so good for the health, and the Japanese tend to eat gyoza in large quantities with ample amounts of beer or sake. For our party, we made over 300 gyoza dumplings by hand... and they all disappeared within the first ten minutes of dinner.

Aya (Japan), Jon (America), and Benjamin (Germany) making gyoza

Satomi (Japan) and Moe (Japan) with the finished products

7:00 After dinner ends, we have free time until the buildings are locked at 9:30. I usually spend the evenings reading, talking with other volunteers around our wood stove, or doing yoga. We also have a weekly Japanese-English exchange group, where, with the help of many patient friends / teachers, I try to improve my "ARI Japanese."

And rinse and repeat! With such a busy schedule, the days seem to fly by - in some ways, it's hard to believe that I've now been in Japan for six months. I realized today, as I introduced some of the new participants to chopsticks and onigiri (rice balls), that Japanese life really feels normal. (So much so that I have to consciously restrain myself from using Japanese catchphrases when I speak to friends and family at home...) That being said, I do miss the U.S. and all my friends very much. I'm looking forward to sharing some of my new Japanese-ness with everyone in the fall!