Sakura Matsuri

So, I used to live in Japan. After university, I didn't know yet what I wanted to do with my life, and I'd been studying Japanese, so I decided that moving to Tokyo to teach English was a great plan. And it was - I met my best friend there, got to experience living in a new country, discovered a love of language and linguistics, and more (trust me, I'll be writing about Japan quite often).

Every year in Japan, the major sign of spring is when the cherry blossom trees bloom. The blossoms are only there for a few weeks before they fall, so the entire country goes rather mad over them. Desserts become cherry blossom-flavoured, everyone does hanami (literally 'flower-viewing', but this involves picnicking with food and lots of alcohol under the cherry blossom trees).

I never actually did hanami when I was in Japan and felt like I missed out. It doesn't seem like a lot, to have skipped picknicking under some trees, but it's such a big deal in Japan I rather regret having not. Of course, I didn't miss seeing the trees themselves - they're everywhere and are impossible to miss. And the sakura-flavoured ice cream is surprisingly good.

The cherry blossom trees are rather symbolic of the ephemeral nature of life - their beauty and transience is associated with mortality - a sort of 'all things pass' idea that's rather intrinsic to a lot of Japanese culture. The song in the video below is even entitled 'Sakura' (the Japanese word for the cherry blossoms).

So, cherry blossoms are a big deal. When I was there, I rather thought that sure, they were pretty, but did they really justify the huge fuss? The weather channel in Japan even provides a forecast on the cherry blossom front, just like you'd report on a cold front coming in, telling people when to expect the blossoms in their area. At the time, perhaps I didn't quite understand how important they were to Japan, but now that I've left Japan, I really miss them.

My boyfriend knew this and tracked down some trees in our city and took me to see them as a surprise. They weren't blooming yet that first time we went, so, naturally, we went back two more weeks in a row to catch them in full bloom. It was rainy and still a bit chilly, but the cherry blossoms were blooming and were beautiful. Our trees are much younger than most of those in Japan and so didn't blanket the entire river like they would have in Tokyo, but they were as beautiful as I remembered and brought back a lot of memories of great times in Japan.

 I said I'm not the biggest fan of surprises, but not the way my boyfriend does it. He does find the most wonderful things to surprise me with. We live in Indianapolis (I've lived a little bit of everywhere, though, so expect a variety of spellings and wordings from me) and it was the last place I would have expected to find cherry blossom trees. But here they are in White River State Park along the riverbank.

Next year, if it's warmer, I'd like to try to do hanami (except without the sake - I'm not a drinker) with him. We can bring a blanket and food and sit under the trees and can bring bento and dango to eat and enjoy the transient beauty of the trees. It won't be quite the same, as there won't be the crowds that there are in Tokyo, but I certainly won't mind having them all to myself with my awesome boyfriend.

Panda Surprise

If you'd asked me a few years ago what my favourite animal was, I definitely wouldn't have said pandas. Obviously I knew about them, mostly about how they were endangered, but I hadn't really thought too much about them beyond that. At least I hadn't until I met my boyfriend, whose favourite animals are dogs (he's year of the dog and so feels an affinity) and pandas.

It didn't take much for him to convert me - a few YouTube videos of baby pandas acting adorable and I was hooked. I was actually the one to discover iPanda, the YouTube account with a 24-hour live panda cam directly into the Chengdu Panda Base in China and almost daily videos of pandas (usually the babies!). It's been a nightly ritual of ours for several years now to watch a few panda videos before going to sleep.

This morning, he told me that he had something he wanted to do today, but wanted it to be a surprise for me. I'm not the biggest fan of surprises, so normally I would have pushed for more details, but he really wanted to surprise me with this one, so I decided to let him.

And it was definitely worth the wait! It turns out he'd booked tickets to the new IMAX film Pandas (narrated by Kristen Bell) in 3D. I couldn't have asked for a better surprise. It was so sweet of him and we both thought it was adorable. The baby pandas are just so cute.

I loved the film - it's not the first panda documentary I've seen at the IMAX. The first one had talked about releasing pandas back into the wild but had been focusing on pandas who had more recent connections to the wild, such as at least one parent who had been captured wild. This new documentary focused on ways to get completely domesticated pandas to learn the natural instincts on their own that would have been taught by their parents if they had been born in the wild and the special panda cub, Chen Chen, chosen to be the first for the project.

It was wonderful to see that there was a long-term plan to not only increase the numbers of wild pandas but to also expand their habitat, since a lot of it had been damaged or destroyed by humans. They're no longer considered endangered, thanks to the efforts of the Chengdu Research Base and others around both China and the rest of the world, but they're still threatened, especially in the wild, so it was really heartwarming to see all of the efforts of people who really care about these adorable bears.

If surprising me with a panda film wasn't enough, my boyfriend had also found out that we have yoshino cherry trees in our city. We went to see them, but they weren't blooming yet. We could see the buds, though, so we'll try again next weekend when they're (hopefully) in full bloom and I'll write more about them and why they mean so much to me then.