Wednesday, October 15, 2003

I saw my first Monkey today in Ajimu.
I was playing tag and hike and go seek with the local neighborhood kids, as I sometimes do when I finish work. During a game of hike and go seek, I noticed a tree was swaying back and forth, and started asking which kid was climbing it. Of course it turned out to be the Monkey.
I knew there were Monkeys in other parts of the prefecture (most notably Monkey Mountain) But didn't know they were living in my town. And in fact this was literally just in the backyard of my apartment.
The kids were just as surprised as me, which indicates this is something of a rarity, and not just a case of me walking past monkeys every day on my way to work and not noticing.
The kids were very excited, and the monkey seemed interested in us too. He climbed down the tree a bit, and was pretty close to us at one point, and then retreated up to the higher branches, where he screeched a lot and jumped around.
The kids really wanted the monkey to come down and play. At first they tried to be really quiet and still to encourage the monkey to come down. They had a hard time achieving this (there was always some kid who couldn't be quiet, and then the other ones would make even more noise trying to hush him up). Failing that, some of them resorted to throwing fruit at the monkey, but I discouraged that. Eventually it got dark and we all went inside.

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