Autumn is Here!

Orange cosmos flowering in front of an old seaside house in Fuchu.

Here's an interesting little difference between New Zealand and the USA:  In New Zealand our seasons start on the first of the month (well, the first of that month), for example, spring starts on September 1st, Autumn starts on March 1st, summer starts on December 1st, Autumn starts on March 1st, and winter starts on June 1st. It's really easy to remember and work around. Granted, this doesn't exactly match the weather exactly, but it works well enough. It appears Japan uses the same system (in reverse, of course), with autumn starting on September 1st. This seems normal to me and to be expected.

HOWEVER, in the USA, they use a different system!! Did you know this?? I didn't! In the USA, spring starts on the vernal equinox (March 21st), summer starts on the summer solstice (which in NZ we tend to call "the longest day", June 21st), autumn (fall) starts on the autumnal equinox (September 23rd), and winter starts on the winter solstice (which in NZ we tend to call "the shortest day", December 21st). I know the dates vary slightly depending on the year, but those are the dates for this year. Isn't that interesting! I imagine the American system is much more in tune with the actual weather, but it takes a bit of getting used to for me, who has grown up with seasons starting on the 1st and lasting for the entirity of those three months.

As you might have guessed, this was a topic of conversation in the Thomas household this September. I woke up on the morning of September 1st and announced that it was now officially autumn.

Liz thought I was bonkers, and informed me that it didn't start until the autumnal equinox on the 23rd!

THE 23rd!?!? Are you mad?!? Why would the season start on such a random date?!

... It's not random! Why else would it be called the AUTUMNAL Equinox?!?!... and so on.

Aaaaaaah, cross-cultural understanding :) haha

So this year we got to celebrate the start of autumn TWICE! Now that's a win-win situation if EVER I heard it!!

Of course, I say we got to "celebrate" the start of autumn, but really... we didn't do any celebrating as such. haha. Who does?

So anyway, in honour of autumn (and more specifically, the cooler weather it brings), Liz and I decided to go for a bike ride to Amanohashidate on Sunday. For those of you who don't know, Amanohashidate is the pine-studded sand spit, which is deemed one of Japan's top 3 most beautiful spots. It really ISN'T one of the most beautiful spots if you ask me, but I'm sure it was back in the day when they decided this. It's nice enough though, and has a pretty beach.

Randomly enough, when we got there (after a nice chatty bike ride... and it should be noted that even though we had a slight head-wind, we still made it there faster than we had expected) there appeared to be a "two day march" going on. I'm not sure what they did on day one, but Sunday was day two, and were all WALKING (note, no marching involved...except for this one old man holding a "two day march" flag... haha) walking along the dirt path through the pine trees... random. It made biking along that path pretty tricky at times, but we did well! We didn't kill a single old person!

We had lunch at our usual restaurant in Monju, and then headed home... but not the direct route... OH NO, we decided to take the LONG route across the spit, into Fuchu and then back through Iwataki. To most of you, this means very little, but just trust me when I say it's about an hour longer than the direct route. But it was fun because we chose to stick to the narrow back streets, and we had the camera on hand, so here are some of the pictures we took:

an old cart parked in a storage shelter on the side of the road.

bushels of rice hanging out to dry

we took narrow backstreets like this one

Liz inspecting (adjusting?) her bike seat. Note the slight incline of the road... it was pretty tiring after a while

and then back onto the cycling path. The trees were showing some autumn colours.

 

Riverside vege plots

Passing through Iwataki on the way home

ps. Just below this you will see that the blog says this was posted by Liz, but (as you will have noticed) it was published by me, Bryn! Actually, it was a team effort, with Liz uploading the pictures, and me doing the typing...

All Shaken Up

Life has been pretty nice and routine for me and Liz here for the last week or so. Our schedule had been fairly full for a while, so it has been nice to relax at home and enjoy the freedom that an empty schedule brings.
Sadly, though, Saturday morning brought anything but relaxation! I was just waking up gradually and fidgeting with my cellphone (turning off the alarms that hadn’t gone off yet and so on), when Liz – who had been up and turning on the computer in the lounge – came into the bedroom and told me to get up and call home because there had been an earthquake in my hometown of Christchurch! At first I just sort of fobbed it off because earthquakes aren’t uncommon at all in New Zealand, or Japan for that matter… but Liz repeated and said that it was a “big” earthquake and that it looked “really bad”…

I got up straight away and we checked out what information we could find quickly online, and then I called home to make sure everyone was ok. THANKFULLY, the earthquake struck at 4:30am or so, so there weren’t many people out and about in the city. Had it been a few hours later, there could well have been a large number of severe injuries and deaths caused by falling bricks and buildings etc.

My friends and family were ok. I was so relieved! My beloved city, however, is pretty badly damaged. About 100,000 houses have been damaged or destroyed, an entire suburb has sunk partially into the ground, and now the bulldozers are in town demolishing those buildings which are deemed unfixable. Aftershocks are still shaking everyone in more ways than one, and some of them are pretty big indeed, causing more even damage to homes and our irreplacable heritage buildings. Only this morning (four days after the main quake) a magnitude 5.1 aftershock rattled the city...it was only 6km deep!

But again, as horrifying as it is to think of the damage, and how long it’s going to take to fix it all up (years, I’d say! If they ever get enough money) it’s still a miracle that nobody died!! That is something we must be truly thankful for! The earthquake was the same size as the one that devastated Haiti not too long ago… but we had NO deaths!
Our thoughts are with friends and family in and around Christchurch as they clean up, rebuild, camp out in shelters, stay with friends, pitch in to help others, and generally try their best to move on with life. Take care!

After such a serious entry, I feel it’s time to share a little humour out of all this… Mum told me that when the earthquake struck, one of her hens got such a fright she laid an egg!! Haha

In other news, it’s been a hideously hot summer here this year. Most days averaging in the high 30s, and very little rain. Today there’s actually a typhoon passing over, causing a fair amount of rain to fall, but it’s only a very weak typhoon, so nothing to worry about at all.

Both my school and Liz’s schools are busy practicing for their school sports days, which will be held this weekend. I’m sure one of us will write something about that next week. Keep watching this space!