Archive for October, 2009

Ekiden 20k

Sunday, October 18th, 2009

I ran the ekiden 20k run today, which is a relay race of 4 people running total 20k (ie 5k each). It was a fun time with all of us running a bit better than we did when we were practicing on our own. I got in at around 25 mins for 5km, which is better than I normally do, so I was happy. Nicole and the kids came too, which helped me to run faster and I felt I was really running quickly when I started. I was in a fit mood today, so it all went very well! Overall, our team of 4 was sort-of in the middle of the teams we had (we had 5 teams in total), so I’m pretty happy. My team consisted of Petter, Sanuki-san and Niclas. Good job team!

Nicole, Evan and Lauren came along and gave me such great support! Afterwards we went to Yoyogi park, where we’d never been before and had some very yummy ramen and gyouza!

Shichi-go-san pictures 2009

Sunday, October 18th, 2009

I wanted to get one more set of shichi-go-san pictures before we left Japan, so we arranged for some photos on Saturday at 9:30am. It was so great seeing the kids all dressed up, and we decided to be part of the pictures this time as well.

It’s not very normal to have a 7-year old boy in the shichi-go-san pictures, so the kimono he wore was quite short – around 15cm on the arms short! But with the lower part of the kimono, it looked quite good in the end. There was a picture of a samurai helmet on the back, and the traditional Japanese wave on the front.

Lauren looked picture perfect as usual, and this time she had more hair to do things with, so the people at the studio did some really neat things with her hair and we were all set.

Here’s a youtube clip from the day:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=co9_qVdTqG0