So we've been in Sasayama for about 3 weeks now and so far, the experience has been absolutely wonderful! The house is currently occupied by 16 people with at least 1 more arriving in the next few days. We have Australians, American's, Canadians, French and Japanese (and of course South African and Estonian), a great mix of people which makes the experience a neverending rollercoaster of stories and culture clashes.
Where to begin, at the beginning I suppose! On our first day we were put on a bicycle and told to ride for 45 minutes through the surrounding villages and countryside to a school of agriculture. The idea was to help the school with their rice harvest and baically chat and have fun with the kids. I guess your wondering after reading so far, why are there 16 people in a traditional JJapanese WWOOFing host family and why are we at a school playing with children? Well, the place we are staying is more of a community service. Our host, Gen Nishimura, is an early thirties Japanese/American who runs an English school and offers our services to local organic farmers in exchange for rice or veggies or whatever they might want to give us.
Most of our days so far have been spent looking after our own field which we maintain in order to eat. We get deer meat from a local hunter whenever we want it (actually, we get a whole deer which we need to butcher ourselves, including skiining). We do not live with Gen but instead a farm house about a 1 minute cycle from his house, we cycle everywhere.
Some of the highlights so far include the rice harvest mentioned above, a curry lunch at nursery where we practised for sports day with the kids and went into their classrooms and played with them, de-weeding a few rice fields for a crazy lady who gave us beer and ice-cream at 10:30 in the morning and making Onigiri (a rice thing which you can look up on Google). I was lucky enough to drive a tractor today to prepare some new fields for planting (part of the project also allows people from the city to use our landing to plant some stuff and we look after it and they come and visit it on the weekend).
We had originally planned to travel around more but have decided that we will spend the remainder of our trip here with a day trip here and there. This weekend (our weekends are on Wednesday and Thursday) we spent 2 nights in Kyoto, but you'll have to come back another ti,
Where to begin, at the beginning I suppose! On our first day we were put on a bicycle and told to ride for 45 minutes through the surrounding villages and countryside to a school of agriculture. The idea was to help the school with their rice harvest and baically chat and have fun with the kids. I guess your wondering after reading so far, why are there 16 people in a traditional JJapanese WWOOFing host family and why are we at a school playing with children? Well, the place we are staying is more of a community service. Our host, Gen Nishimura, is an early thirties Japanese/American who runs an English school and offers our services to local organic farmers in exchange for rice or veggies or whatever they might want to give us.
Most of our days so far have been spent looking after our own field which we maintain in order to eat. We get deer meat from a local hunter whenever we want it (actually, we get a whole deer which we need to butcher ourselves, including skiining). We do not live with Gen but instead a farm house about a 1 minute cycle from his house, we cycle everywhere.
Some of the highlights so far include the rice harvest mentioned above, a curry lunch at nursery where we practised for sports day with the kids and went into their classrooms and played with them, de-weeding a few rice fields for a crazy lady who gave us beer and ice-cream at 10:30 in the morning and making Onigiri (a rice thing which you can look up on Google). I was lucky enough to drive a tractor today to prepare some new fields for planting (part of the project also allows people from the city to use our landing to plant some stuff and we look after it and they come and visit it on the weekend).
We had originally planned to travel around more but have decided that we will spend the remainder of our trip here with a day trip here and there. This weekend (our weekends are on Wednesday and Thursday) we spent 2 nights in Kyoto, but you'll have to come back another ti,
