Fall outing to see the beauty of God's creation

Well yesterday the grandmother of one of my students invited my co-net and me to go up into the mountains and see the fall leaves changing colors. As we were driving up the mountains, I felt like I was back home in Chattanooga. Chattanooga is very beautiful in the fall, and driving through the Japanese mountains with the leaves changing colors reminded me very much of home. And then driving up the mountain that we were going to, was just like driving up Lookout Mountain. This is a picture of Gini (my co), me and my student's grandmother (I don't know her name, we all just call her "Nijika's grandmother").


The place we went to turned out to be the country club where she is a member. And we rode around the course, which was very hilly and looked very hard, and looked at the leaves. It was beautiful. Most of the trees where Japanese maples. Which look just like American maples, but much much shorter and with smaller leaves. The Japanese version look like bushes next to their American cousins. In Japanese they call the tree もめじ　(momeji).

The beautiful mountains of Japan.


It was amazing how red the leaves turned. I love it.
I know this one is blurry, sorry about that. Remember, we where riding around in a golf cart. But the tree in the back looks like its burning. I thought that turned out really cool.



After driving around in the cold, we went back inside and had some coffee. We saw signs talking about a concert, but weren't really sure what was going on. So we just sat and talked, it was a really good thing that Gini was there and knew some Japanese, because I can't really communicate in Japanese except to ask where something is and if ask if you like something, which gets pretty dull after a while. So Gini got to practice her Japanese and I learned a couple of things too.

We finally did learn that there was going to be a concert and the whole evening centered around the もめじ (Japanese maple). The headliner for the evening was a man who makes Japanese flutes out of the roots of trees. He came over to our table before the concert and showed us his instruments and demonstrated their different sounds and how he made them. It was amazing.

Here are a few of the flutes he had made.

He even let us hold them, the big ones were really heavy.

The one Gini is holding was made by layering black and red paint many times and then rubbing off the paint to create the design you see.
Here he is showing us that he can play two at one time. It was supercool.

Then the concert started. It was really good. One of the songs they played was the theme from the "Pink Panther". They call it "pinku pansaa".

After the concert we drove back home to good old Toyota. It was a fun evening. And I enjoyed getting to know my student's grandmother a little bit. She is a nice lady.