Let the WWOOFing begin!

I have arrived at my first wwoof farm after last night at my first couch surf. Nice so far. The couchsurf was in the north of Tokyo in a place I would not otherwise have visited. The woman owner runs an English school with tea and conversation every saturday evening and I felt compelled to be there. It was fun. I got my first Kanji lesson (Japanese script), which I've already mostly forgotten. This morning I woke up at 4AM, just before the trains began to run for the day (one drawback of awesome train service is living next to the tracks...), and decided to stay up and start my day with some yoga, meditation, and soba noodles at home. Then I set out around 6am to try to find a temple to meditate at, but no luck, so I just walked. Around 7:30 (the only Japanese people I saw at this hour were out walking thier dogs, pretty much. A few heading to work...), I found a shrine/temple looking building, so I wandered over. The gate was open and I went in and saw a 20' tall statue of the Bodisattva of compassion. The building was locked, but from the porch I could see a bunch of tightly packed grave monuments, granite stone blocks stacked together with wooden paddle-shaped sticks sticking up in back scripted in kanji. I assume well-wishes for the dead?

Towards the end of my circuit around the grounds, I found a ginko biloba tree (they are everywhere here!) 4' in diameter!! That was awe-inspiring.

Then I walked over the bridge across the train tracks that divde this part of town and into the main park where I sat by the pond in the zen garden and tried to learn from the fish and the turtles and the birds. A man cycled up to me and we shared a few minutes of conversation in broken bits and pieces of each other's languages. Pretty cool.

I walked back to my room at the english school, ate some more, packed up and headed for the train. I am far enough from Tokyo in a small enough town that the train stations on the ticket price chart are no longer labled in English. Fortunately, my next stop is a central one, and they are in bigger boxes and I recognized the script on my English and Japanese language Tokyo train map (which is a ridiculously useful piece of paper), so I got that one right. One train from Kura-Utawa to Omiya, change train lines and go to Kawagoe, change train lines and go to Ogasaki (I think that's the wrong city, but it starts with an O...) and stay on that line but change trains to go to Obusuma (it's a pretty small station towards the end of the line, so not many of the trains run this far. We sat in the train for about 10 or 15 minutes while 2 or 3 other trains from Tokyo came in and people trickled onto our train.

At Obusuma station, I called my WWOOF host to confirm my ride and she said she's never heard of Obusuma. yikes, what??? I slowly realize as we communicate and try to sort out our confusion that she speaks a lot more English than she seemed to when I called her to check in from Kawagoe 90 minutes ago...it dawns on me: I dialed the wrong number! This is my couch surf host from last night! duh...a couple minutes and a dollar later, I dial the right number, drop another dollar coin into the phone and connect with my ride. Huzzah!

A few people arrive at the station to buy tickets or ask a question or get dropped off by loved ones and I stand and greet them expectantly and briefly feel like a fool (or an ignoramus, anyway) each time. A few minutes pass, but not more than 15, and two exuberantly smiling people drive up, wave and hop out of their car to greet me. They wear muddy boots and shoes and have dirty clothes and I like them both immensely right away. We re-arrange the back seat of their little boxey SUV/minivan (think of a Honda Element put through the Honey I Shrunk the Kids machine), drop my daypack in the back, and we're off. I can't remember anything to say, so I pull out my Lonely Planet Japanese phrase book (LAX bookstore, baby--only $8 new...I didn't think that was too bad) and study it carefully for about 30 seconds. I figure the driver is the farm owner, Keiko, but I don't know the guy in back, so I ask his name in Japanese. They both laugh (that's what I was hunting through my little book for?) and I find out Masaku is a 17 year-old half-Japanese, half-Nepalese guy who lives at Keiko's farm. He speaks pretty good English and I get very excited. From Keiko's emails, I was expecting to learn a lot of Japanese really fast or sink in the tempestous sea behind the language barrier. Masaku's language skills are a pleasant surprise.

Before I know it we're at the farm, Masaku marvels at how small and light my pack is (hehe-oh yeah!), shows me to my house and introduces me to my housemate, Jean, a Taiwanese woman about my age who also speaks very good english. Awesome.

Jean shows me around the house, including the outdoor washing machine and indoor pit toilet (go figure), then takes me to the kitchen to see the schedule and where the food is. I cook myself some lunch--cabbage, carrots, eggs, oil, vinegar, and curry with 3 slices of different kinds of whole-grain bread, about as good as what I bake at home! Yum. During lunch, I meet one of the other farm workers and we chat and visit using her moderate English skills and an electronic dictionary (maybe I won't feel so language impaired after all!).

Turns out I arrived smack in the middle of lunch break and chores start again at 2:30. Jean and I are to begin the afternoon by watering the chickens and collecting the eggs, so we pedal over to the hen houses, which are on Keiko's property down the road about 5 mintues on classic Japanese bikes: single-speed girl's bikes with racks on the back and baskets in front. Did I mention there are 700 chickens? Yeah, that's a lot...

Then we cut cucumber leaves to try to stop a tiny-bug infestation, then we weeded the strawberry patch (it's just past strawberry season, so Jean said I could help myself! I liked that job.), and finally we put the sheep into their night pens and fed them kitchen scrap vegetables and fermented sheep feed? I don't know what it was...corn, rice, or soy byproduct, maybe?

Keiko and another farm worker prepared dinner and we came in to help set the table, make tea, and partake. Family style. yum.

After dinner I stretched a little (much needed!), helped Jean with some translation stuff, and gave Keiko a reflexology massage. She fell asleep, so I think she enjoyed it. lol.

Thus concludes this entry chapter in my journey into WWOOFing in Japan.
Blessings!