Saturday, 12 April 2008
Don’t let anyone try to tell you that it’s impossible to get a good night’s sleep on a futon. Not the futon they’ll try to sell you in your local downtown furniture store, one with four legs, a metal frame and a basic mattress - I’m talking the mattress on the floor routine with a good layer of insulation over the top to keep out the Kitakami chill.
I slept like a log (and probably sawed a few) before rising ultra-fashionably late on a day when the first item on the agenda was attending to the laundry.
Once we’d arranged the washing on the upstairs balcony the thoughts turned to sightseeing and it was around eleven when two Japanese women, one large hairy foreigner and one small hairy dog found themselves en route to the gorge at Genbi where we would, or so I was informed, be having flying dumplings - which I assumed would comprise lunch.
Actually I wasn't too sure what was in store since I’d heard a variety of pronunciations, flying, frying, dumplings and dungo.
And I was kept in suspense since, immediately after parking the car in Genbi we plunged into the Sahara Glass Hall, a store selling glass objects in multitudinous forms. This, I gathered, was largely a stratagem to avoid paying for parking.
Having established our status as at-least-potential-customers, the Grog Dog was retrieved from the car and we set off for the gorge, which was a short stroll away.
A bridge took us over the stream and a right-hand turn meant we were headed directly towards flying dumpling territory.
I had assumed that flying dumplings was not, as the name suggested, something resembling a food fight, and ‘Er Indoors later confided that she suspected we were headed somewhere we would be throwing items, possibly as some sort of ritual.