We`re in Osaka staying with Brandon and Nozomi Caruthers who live with Nozomi`s family in western Osaka. Brandon served with me in Hiroshima as a missionary and he now works at Forever Living Products, an aloe vera MLM. Today we took a minivan to Kyoto and visited Kinkakuji temple (above,) a train Museum, and kiomizudera (pure water temple). With Melissa and Nozomi both pregnant, we took it slow, which was just as well. The Caruthers son Tyler is seven months younger than Callan and they both enjoyed having friend to play with (that is of course, when they werent fighting over toys). They did a lot of running and giggling and attempting to play baseball.
From What I have been told, Kinkaku ji is famous for having been founded by the most politically inempt, but artistically inclined leaders of ancient Japan. His inability to lead effectively lost him and his family their dynasty, but the cultural center he founded in Kyoto, with this golden palace at its center, created the foundation upon much of modern Japanese Cultural identity is built. The lake around the temple is full of Koi, turtles, and small trees growing out of the water, resting in elegant poses, as if they could remember the courtly dance performances that took place on boats out on the water so many hundreds of years ago. There were hundreds and hundreds of people flowing down the foot paths surrounding the temple, faces from all over the world come to glimpse the most famous ancient building in Japan. Part of me felt like the gold was too much. In the pictures, it looks very elegant, very imperial, very surreal. In real life, it is just a building coated in gold. The surface is not smooth in some places, and actually looks a little bit like it has been spray painted gold, rather than plated in gold leaf (of course I dont think it has been spray painted. Merely I was expecting the shimmer of gold statuary, and up close the texture is a bit wanting. Still, it was amazing to see, and it has really rounded out our tourist experiences here to have been able to come to Kyoto.
Callan has done very well this trip. For being two years old, he puts up with a lot of being drug around to fairly boring tourist sites, with little complaining. However, these four Maiko (Geisha in training) were too much for him. I suggested we take a picture and he melted into tears, saying he didnt like those girls and that they were scary. He is crying pretty hard in this picture.

At the West Japan Rail train museum we got to ride on a real steam train, get inside the engine control room of several old steam trains, and learn all about how old steam engines worked. Besides a minor tiff with Tyler over who got to spin a wheel inside the control room, the kids really enjoyed it.

Tomorrow we are going to try and get into a bunraku puppet show if they arent too expensive, were going to the top of an huge building to see the observation deck, and well do some window shopping.

Lately I have been feeling a bit emotional about this entire Japan experience. We came nine months ago, in the middle of the blazing summer humidity to an unfamiliar country, and have been trying to chip out a place for ourselves in our new world ever since. As the air has become warmer and the subtle signs of spring have begun to blossom, spin webs, and chirp in the fields, I often recall our first unsure week here in Japan. Sharing a house with seven other people at my bosses house our first week was difficult, but I wouldnt trade the experience. In the evenings, after coming home from work those first few days, after eating a simple dinner and changing Callan into pajamas, we put him in his stroller and took him for a walk in the darkness of our new neighborhood.

Far from cool, but less chaffing than the heat of the day, the quiet evenings provided us the opportunity to be on our own to talk, to soak in our new reality, and to put Callan to bed. For Melissa everything was new, and for me it was like reliving a dream. We had no clue what we were getting into, no idea the friends we would make, the places we would go, the accidents we would have, the blessings we would reap. All we could think about was the heat, the pending move into our new home, lesson plans, bills, and getting settled.

Now, in the pleasant sway of spring, we walk again through our neighborhood, not as strangers, but as a part of the scenary. The homes and fields that once felt so alien to us, have now, saturated with memories, become our backyard. Like learning a new word, and then hearing it everywhere, when a strange place becomes home, we begin to see its value. There are a million narrow streets, lined by rice fields and ramen shops in this country, but it is the ones I have spent the past nine months driving down that have become meaningful. The park in our neighborhood was merely a slide and a patch of dirt, but now it is a baseball field, a gymnastics arena, and a amusement park all rolled into one. The ricefields next to our home were just grass, and now they`re a marker of the seasons, a home to all of the noises that make this place ours; the early morning grind of the tractor plow, the twilight croak of a thousand frogs singing in coolness of the mud, the dialectic chatter of our neighbor as he leans on his shovel and dicusses the harvest with his aged wife, the sound of our neighbors dog, who hearing his masters car from blocks away, lets into a howl of excitement and stands at the fence, chain taught at his neck, in anticipation.