Sarah’s Blog Post 20: February 19, 2016
Yesterday, I saw the first cherry blossom
forecast for this year. I am very excited because my mom will be visiting me at
the end of March, and the cherry blossoms are forecasted to begin blooming
around March 26th in Tokyo. It is very lucky that she will be able
to see cherry blossoms in Japan the first time that she visits. I was also able
to see cherry blossoms the first time I visited Japan in 2008. This year’s
“hanami”, or cherry blossom viewing, will be very nostalgic for me.
The other exciting part about cherry
blossom season is the number of special sakura-themed products that stores and
restaurants begin selling. One of my friends told me that Starbucks was going
to release a sakura flavored Frappuccino. I was very excited to taste it and
bought one today. It was great, but it tastes more like strawberry than sakura,
and there are too many chocolate shavings in it. They get stuck at the bottom
and don’t mix well with the cold drink. Yesterday Yaya and I also went to the
monthly tea ceremony with the tea ceremony club. Iwatsu-sensei, Yoshida-sensei,
Morita-sensei, and Ozaki-sensei taught us about “Hina-matsuri”, or girl’s day.
Yaya says that they celebrate girl’s day a little differently in Hawaii. I
don’t have any experience though because we don’t celebrate girl’s day in the
mainland United States (all US states except for Hawaii and Alaska).
