Half Day Around USA

19th May 2012

After I moved to Oita, my friend SK brought me around the town to help me familiarize with the place and to tour some of the local attractions. Initially, we wanted to go to a place to see wisteria lane, however, we didn't know that the flowers were all gone, just left the green leaves on the vines, we missed the blooming time and we were only one week late. Haiz! 

wisteria lane minus the flower

But, we got to see a tea farm nearby. It's quite soothing. 5th May is the children's day in Japan, and people with children at home will normally raise the carp shaped flags 鯉幟. When there're many flags, it is very pretty to look at.

tea farm

tea farm

tea farm

carp flags 鯉幟

Well, not being able to see the wisteria lane was quite disappointing. However, we moved on to second location.

odd shape tress lined the road

The second place we visited was the Memorial Hall of Futabayama 双葉山の記念館. Futabayama was a very famous sumo wrestler who won consecutively for 69 times in major sumo matches. According to wikipedia, apparently it is a unbeaten record so far. Oita sure is still very proud of him, when I went for a wine festival, his face could still be seen on the souvenirs. The only sumo match I have ever seen was on TV, I couldn't understand the game at all.

Memorial Hall of Futabayama 双葉の里

Memorial Hall of Futabayama 双葉の里

flowers around the area

After that, we went to the Tokoji Temple 東光寺五百羅漢. The temple is famous for the 500 statues of Arhat 羅漢. All the stone statues were carved by the same stone carver in 24 year from Ansei 6 years to Meiji 15 years. Wow, that's a great dedication!

Tokoji 東光寺

All the statues have different expressions on their faces, happy, anger, sad, etc. All the emotions.

東光寺五百羅漢

東光寺五百羅漢

Next to the temple was a wheat field. When I first saw this, I guessed that's not paddy because the paddy field opposite my apartment was still green, then I remembered the picture on the packaging of the flour. It looked same, it's wheat. LOL, that was the first time I saw the real wheat on the ground.

wheat field

wheat

Well, it's an enjoyable outing to see all the greeneries.

*Usa 宇佐 is a city in Oita. Sometimes, my colleagues from Usa loved to say that they came from U.S.A. I didn't get the jokes until someone explained it to me, to me, Usa sounds like 'wusa', so my mind never drifted to "U.S.A".