Groundhog Days in Osaka – A Library Visit and Fall Fun

This week has felt a bit like we are living the movie Groundhog Day. If you’ve never seen the 1993 movie staring Bill Murray this reference won’t make sense to you. Basically, Bill Murray’s character wakes up and relives the same day over and over – which happens to be Groundhog Day. It’s a great movie!

I was thinking of this analogy while attempting to fall asleep last night. As our varying degrees of coughing echoed throughout the house, I had to think really hard to recall what we did this week. Our days have consisted of school, eating 3 meals a day, some walking, and that’s about it. The last place you want to be when you have a coughing fit is a packed subway train or restaurant. Because of this, we haven’t been going anywhere since we explored Dotonbori almost a week ago. It’s basically been the same day over and over. We’ve lived plenty of Groundhog Days in Colorado, but it feels a bit worse when you’re far away from home.

Exploring the Local Library

I think we are finally on the tail end of this sickness, so we ventured to the local library today. Exploring libraries in different countries was on my list of things I really wanted to see. The library in our neighborhood in Osaka is on the 8th floor of the community building and has expansive views of the city. It was very similar to any other library, just with everything in Japanese. Braxton found one small section of English picture books, which he was excited about it. It was also fun to see some American classics on the shelf!

Fun fact about Japanese writing, most novels are written vertically, in a style called tategaki. The text runs top to bottom in vertical columns. So, for this book you would start at the top right corner and read down, moving one column to the left each time. Every book feels backwards (you open it with the spine on the right).

Bringing Fall Fun Abroad

I don’t think we’ll get to experience fall colors this year (it’s still remarkably warm), so Alexis and I created a ’31 Days of Halloween’ list to bring some fall fun into our days. Some things are school related and some are just for fun. Today the kids each compiled a slideshow of pictures from all of our previous Halloweens. It was so fun to see what they came up with! Just for nostalgia, here they each are on their first Halloween. If you didn’t know, Braxton was born on Halloween!

We are hoping to do Field Trip Friday tomorrow. We have less than 2 weeks left in Osaka and a lot of things we still want to see!