hattori ryokuchi park

Monday was a holiday, so we headed out to Hattori Ryokuchi Park. It was our first time here and was about a 15 minute walk from the Hankyu Sone Station. The park is 126 hectares or 311 acres.

Or as the Japanese like to say, it is 33 times the size of Koshien Stadium. I always wonder why they compare the size of things to baseball stadiums, not like I can visualize the size.

Anyway, lunch was leftover chinjaorosu, some rice and Asian pear.

I have to show you this new trick I just learned.

When you peel the skin of your Asian pear, don't peel it all the way. This will help keep it from turning brown without having to squeeze some lemon on it.

It was actually quite HOT this day, I think the temps were somewhere like 26C (78F).

And a little humid too..blah.

But, there were many out and about.

And with all the people at the park, there were also many lost children being called out over the PA system.

We checked out an area of the park where they have about 10 farm houses from around Japan.

I was kind of in awe of this because they have the actual sized houses, which means they need a LOT of land for this.

There is a small admission to go in to see these houses (500 yen), but we thought it was totally worth it to see the different types of farm houses.

Near one of the farm houses, I noticed there were a couple of chestnut trees and the "sea urchins" were all over the ground...so I sorta helped myself...(I was able to pick up 13)

This photo is for my blog friend, Jalna.

I hope to be able to share with you what I did with this chestnuts.

I also took this photo of this woman sitting in one of the farm houses, it's my favorite at the moment.

We're looking forward to checking out this park again for cherry blossom season.