Recently, the Japan-Frantz family became the victim of a case of Parking-Rage. While out on a meandering family drive, one of our efforts to get out and see non-Tokyo Japan, we spotted a nice shallow river with an generous public walkway along its Eastern shore. As a Lucas bonus, the river came with an ample supply of rocks along its edge. Lucas, always being civic minded, enjoys relocating stranded rocks into the river from which they originally came. Sometimes he throws them in…and some times he utilizes a more direct hand delivery method (a.k.a.: falling in).
So there we were; in the car and getting giddy about our impending walk of family fun. I pulled off and found a nifty spot to park. We were in a relatively small town and the parking spot I found was 1 of 9 unmarked and empty parking spaces along the riverfront.
So far so good. We went our walk, which was very nice. Lucas expedited the return of rocks into the water via the special patented Lucas ‘direct hand delivery method’. Babies slept, Daddies and Mommies were splashed, fish were terrorized, fishermen were annoyed, and life was good. After about an hour and a half of walking, puttsing, splashing, and terrorizing we decided to head back home.
When we got to the car we did the family get-in-the-car dance. Lucas bolted from his stroller and ran circles around the car while I chased him. Rhorie spit up on Rheagan and asked for more lunch in the most animated terms possible. Eventually, I caught up with Lucas only to bump into Rheagan and become smeared with Rhorie spity. *sigh*
With both children finally contained and back into the relatively secure safety of their respective holding pens (baby seats). Rheagan and I each sighed one more time and sank into our seats and fumbled towards the AC controls.
However something wasn’t quite right.
I looked up and found myself looking directly into a hand written letter that had been duct-taped to the windshield of the driver’s side of the car. The letter was written completely in Japanese (not the best hand writing either). So of course we had no idea what it said. But there where a whole bunch of exclamation points…so who ever had written it, must have been very excited.
On closer inspection, the duct-tape turned out to be supper adhesive packing-tape. And the Tapeing Artist chose not to use the minimum amount of tape necessary to get the job done (let alone the windshield wiper). He instead chose to tape every edge of the letter to the windshield with 12 centimeter wide tape; double layering on the top and the bottom for good measure.
Evidently, we had parked in a private restaurant parking lot. The proprietor, who I assume to be the Tapeing Artist did not appreciate us taking up one of his nine empty parking spaces and decided to make sure that we didn’t forget it. Sure enough, the whole experience has been seared into my memory due to the 20 minutes I spent trying to peal the packing-tape off of our car’s windshield. This of course added an additional 20 minutes to our parking space violation time. I am ashamed to say that I was mostly snickering during the 20 minute peel-the-packing-tape part of the day. :)
I think that I was supposed to be more upset. But the whole incident seemed so ridiculous. We were in the otherwise empty parking lot for 90 minutes (5:30 to 7:00 pm) on a weekend in a smallish town. Our car has US Government license tags. The characters on the tags are written in Western characters, unlike regular Japanese tags, which are always written in Kanji or Hiragana. So the Tapeing Artist would have known for sure that we were Americans and very likely not able to read Japanese…and also very likely not to ever be able to find our way back to what ever town it was that we had stumbled on to.
So mission accomplished: one more Japanese National alienated by the Frantz family occupation force. Actually, if you give us full credit for the three annoyed fishermen, then the count is up to four. …and actually, if you and in a dozen or so terrorized fish then we may be talking about some kind of family record. :)
Yup, she has red hair. Boys & Girls, ye be warned --- Lots of new photos to see in the gallery. Enjoy!
Sorry for letting the web site run amock with vile spam/bot messages --> it is all gone now. However, just in case ... please let me know if I missed any.
This last batch of junk seemed more vile than usual...very unsettling