Hokkaido Horses

It was a cold but beautiful afternoon in Shisetsuri. The snow was falling lightly and as I rode Aika, (a beautiful tan dosanko pony), I often looked up to see blue sky patches through the clouds and the leafless treetops.

A good day for a ride.

Conditions were perfect for training. With about 80 cm of snow on the ground, it would be difficult for the horses to run quickly and should I have fallen off Aika for any reason...cold white powder would cushion the blow.

Hiratasan, (our landowner and the horse trainer) tied Annie to Aika's tail to prevent her from her usual tomfoolery of taking off from her mother and causing quite a disturbance. I named the red haired filly Annie after the strong willed and intelligent red headed orphan Anne from the Canadian novel, Anne of Green Gables.

There are 44 horses on the ranch right now. Ten of the horses are miniature ponies and there is one huge draft horse. The rest are all a unique-to-Hokkaido dosanko breed. Come April a whole new heap of little ones will be born and we will be here to celebrate their entry into the world.

Lots to enjoy now and to look forward to in the spring!

Oh happy days!

t


Dosanko foals -photo taken in October '08

Senior Sensations

Three times a month we teach English at Silver City, a senior citizens home in Kushiro. There are 10 students in our class their ages ranging from 75 to 100!

Today we taught consonant identification by having our students bend and/or connect coloured pipe cleaners into Ns, Ps, Qs, Ss....

Our eldest student is 100 years of age and you should have seen him make his letters. He needed a little assistance at times to know what letter we were working on but once he knew that, he was quick and accurate. We were so impressed!

I really should not have been surprised considering that most Japanese seniors know the letters for three different alphabets -hiragana and katakana (the Japanese ones), and Kanji (the Chinese of which there are over 2000 characters). All school age students now learn and can recognize the Romanji alphabet (that would be the one we use).

And I thought we had it tough having to learn 26 letters of the English alphabet.

Ha!

t