Spring Has Come...Hanami Time

I'm still trying to do some catch-up here with this blog... but as the title suggests it's Spring-time here in Adelaide. These photos were from the beginning of October...

We bought our house about 2.5 years ago... after an incredibly painful process (Australia, and Adelaide had been going through a housing boom that was like trying to catch a runaway train... blindfolded). Anyhow, one of the selling points of the house was a weeping cherry tree out the front. I guess it just reminded us of our Japanese connections. And every Spring for about 2 weeks, we get to enjoy a little bit of Japan in our front yard. 

And every Spring we grab our picnic rug, we (ok - mostly T-chan) makes some yummy dishes and we head out for a picnic under the Sakura tree. Now this is a bit of a reminder of the hanami (flower viewing) outings that are an annual feature of Japanese life... if you check out my Japanese Ties blog shortly, you'll see the real thing (check it out here). Now hanami typically involves eating and drinking under the blossoms as groups of friends, family or work colleagues. Perhaps the emphasis is on the drinking these days... as it's one of those opportunities for the Japanese to let their hair down. Ours is however very much a family affair. 

L-kun enjoys onigiri (rice ball) as Dad and T-kun (our cat) watch on

I'll post up a few more slightly older posts as I go... but I'll also try and throw in some simple Japanese lessons as I go. Be warned however... you would not want me teaching you Japanese...but I will do my best.

花見 - hanami, is made up of 花 (hana= flower, blossom) and 見る (miru = verb to look, or view). Japanese writing is made up of a number of different forms, from the so-called native kana script (which can either be hiragana or katakana), chinese kanji script (the more complex form), and then of course there's romaji (our roman alphabet). In this case, 花 and 見 are kanji characters and る is the hiragana character for "ru".