Golden Week Begins

Golden Week is a week of holidays in Japan, starting on April 29th. For the average Japanese person, it means a whole week of vacation. For the average American in Sasebo, it means lots of pottery sales. I've blogged before about the insane pottery sales in the area and how overwhelming all that pottery can be. This year, my dad was here to witness the insanity. So yesterday, armed with a stroller, diapers, wipes, and all the usual baby stuff, we set out to find some good deals on pretty things:

We walked through Arita for between four and five hours and didn't find the end of the shops, nor did we really pick through most of them. My find for the day was a cute fountain. The kind salesman went into great detail about how to put it together when I got home...

... of course he was speaking Japanese so... we'll see how that goes..

We worked out that we went about 3 and a half kilometers by the time our walk was done. Dad described it as Disney World of Pottery. I think that might catch the feeling of the thing. Ela was not in the best mood, but she did pretty good. I think she got tired of being in the carseat. So at the end, we put our purchases (which were many) in the stroller and I carried her. She liked this a lot better...

The Japanese people, who had been trying to see her in the stroller all day, liked it better, too. One of the salemen chatted with us and a few Japanese girls about her. He said she looked older than 2 months (his first guess was four months), and that she looked like her grandpa (which made us laugh).
When we got home, Ela worked off some steam by learning to roll over! She went from her tummy to her back... twice! Granted, she was on a chair so she had a little bit of incline to help her out, and she was not successful in repeating the achievement this morning, but she has the basic idea now, and I'm sure it's only a matter of time... Little girl is going to be mobile before we know it!