We've been having a great time with the boys. Since the oyster festival weekend we have been busy, as usual. The boys spent the days during the week exploring around the town. They've made several trips to the hardware and auto parts stores. Luckily, that also resulted in us getting our car & door handle fixed. Thanks Jessie & Jimmy!
This weekend we ventured out to Nagasaki so the boys would have the chance to see the Peace Park and the Atomic Bomb Memorial Museum. We had a fun time driving down to Nagasaki, since all the times in the past Casey and I have taken a train or a bus. The country-side here is so beautiful, we just really enjoy cruising around. We were all worried that the tolls were going to be super expensive, but we were lucky, round trip we only paid about $15. Much cheaper than 4 round trip train tickets! Plus, parking was fairly cheap, too!
It's such a fun time seeing Casey and his brothers together. I didn't have brothers growing up, so this is a totally new experience for me. I make LOTS of food, and they just love to pick on each other, it's really quite hilarious because each one of them does an impression of the other, but in the end they all sound exactly the same anyway! (Think mumbling southern accents with food in their mouths) :) Silly boys! Lucky for me I still think fart jokes are hilarious, and we've even got a special nick-name for Jimmy: The Nocturnal Sharecropping Retard. I guess you had to be there...? Jessie seems to think everything in Japan is "sick". He won't try raw fish (OK, he had one TINY bite...but that didn't count), and he even thinks the temples/shrines aren't worth visiting. He seems to think they're just too anti-Christian to bother going. I hope he's still enjoying himself though, there's so many things to enjoy and appreciate here, even if it's not your cup of tea all the time. At least he likes the cars!
We were lucky to find a nice church Jessie liked going to for Sunday, so we had a pretty quiet morning while he went to service and we did some sleeping in and chatting over cups of coffee and tea. By the time he made it back we were well into lunch-time and had our tummies rumbling. I cooked up some yummy quesadillas, which were delish! We decided to make the afternoon push to go back out to Hirado and the lighthouse we had visted earlier in the year. Jessie was too pooped to make it so he stayed home and had a nap. It was a shame he missed out though because it turned out to be one of our best adventures so far. We stopped in Hirado, which Casey and I had only passed through before, and were surprised to find quite a large castle structure that was open to the public. The place was practically empty so we took our time perusing the grounds and viewing their artifacts from the times of the samurai. There was a very beautiful temple there too, which must have recently had some visitors, because there was a whole tree filled with tied papers with prayers written on them. There was also a super-giant size oyster shell, at least four feet across! Crazy! We ended up spending a lot more time in the castle than we had originally planned, but it was so interesting we really had a nice time exploring the grounds. By the time we left were were pressed for time to get out to the lighthouse by sunset. We raced through some of the rural farming areas pretty quickly, which didn't give Jimmy much of a chance to snap the drive-by pictures, but maybe we enticed him enough that he can convince Jessie to go back out with him again.
We missed the official "sunset" but we were still out there in enough time to see the twilight and the moon rise. It was quite a beautiful night, and Jimmy snapped some great pictures. I don't know if they brought their camera cords with them here, but I'm hoping to steal some of those pictures he took at the cliffs. We spent the remainder of the night having dinner and doing a puzzle, that we found along our travels (I had no idea the Burnette's were puzzle-fiends! Those boys really got into it, Casey too!). I'm pretty excited to do some more puzzle-ing together. The jury is still out though on whether we should save the puzzle (i.e. glue over it once finished and frame it) or take it apart to save it for another puzzle-ing time. Anyone care to weigh in on what to do with a finished puzzle? Art or game? Stephanie & Heidi Furst: please tell me you remember the Carmen San Diego Puzzle Board Game that we did about 10,000 times in our childhoods...?
P.S. We got SUMO TICKETS! We'll be having a big send-off weekend in Fukuoka with the boys! Woo! Also, I quit my job, but I'll write about that later...and I'm going to Singapore!
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