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Blueberry Picking |Misawa, Aomori

Here are the basics:

• stroller friendly, though I would recommend wearing babies instead • I would not bring pets to this particular farm • awesome for even young kids- no thorns on the fruit plants, so even our 11 month old picked her own berries •

Hours: I will update the hours once I find my photo of the sign, sorry! We usually go around 2-3pm.
Usually berries are the ripest during the last week of July.
Directly from base, only about a 20 min drive.

40.783798, 141.363129

Our second year to visit this farm, and I am finally confident enough that y’all need to visit to release the pin. This may be a commonly visited farm, but we stumbled upon it without a pin, and I LOVE the owners. So kind, always so good to our kids, and their berries are amazing.

Entry fees are 500¥ per person, and both of our kids were free. To take out blueberries, you will pay 120¥/100 grams, which is DIRT CHEAP compared to ANY blueberry prices at local grocery stores. If I remember correctly, children under age 7 eat for free.

In total, we paid exactly 2000¥ for all-you-can-eat blueberries, and an additional gallon sized ziplock full of blueberries. The owners of this farm always encourage us to eat, eat, eat- especially towards the end of the season. They provide buckets to pick with, and even have small baskets for children.

This particular farm has always been extremely quiet, with lots of options as to areas that you can pick from. We have never even felt like we were picking around other people. 

Park directly in front of the greenhouse, when you drive in you will see the family’s house to the left, and the greenhouse to the right. There is a small parking area between the two.
As is often customary in Japan, this is both the family’s home, and their business. Make sure you are respectful, as this is where they live.

Blueberry and mud face

I would recommend wearing/bringing bug spray- the mosquitoes aren’t bad here, but the ants are. Honestly they weren’t pesky enough to pose a problem this year, but I remember they were THICK last year.

If you want to know what life with Henry is like right now, this is it. Constantly shaking a stick or toy at you saying “pew pew pew pew pew!”

This family is extremely gracious, and almost always gives us a “free gift” or knocks down the price a little bit. Last year at the end of the season, when the berries were ripe, ripe, ripe, we took home almost 4lbs of berries for around $9.90.

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Last year: This was the first bag we picked, we went home with around 4x this many berries.

If you’re new to Misawa, make sure you also check out my post on cherry picking. We are planning to hit the apple farms, strawberry farms, and maybe even pick some raspberries this year too.

Enjoy! The berries are delicious!

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Cherry Picking- June 29

Oh my goodness was this a short, fun little day trip. All you can eat fresh cherries for 40 minutes on a warm June day. Can you beat that? 

Here are the coordinates directly to the parking lot- it is a very small shop with a couple vending machines on the side. It is right on the corner of several streets. The owners were super friendly, despite our inability to understand how the process worked. Ha.

40.405600, 141.325477

Disclaimer: Like I said, we didn’t realize how this process worked, so we unfortunately did not realize that you are not supposed to bring a container inside the picking area with you. This is an all-you-can-eat-only kind of deal, then you can purchase cherries in boxes afterwards. When they didn’t hand us any baskets, we assumed we were just supposed to bring our own, and grabbed a Daiso basket from the car.

Thankfully Henry didn’t pick MANY cherries, but we still felt so bad bringing a bucket to the front when they didn’t charge us for them.

The Japanese hosts were so kind to us when we brought out a small container of cherries that Henry had picked, but we felt SO bad that we didn’t realize that we were only supposed to eat freely while in there. With our blueberry picking experience last year, you could pay for the weight of whatever you carried out, so we assumed we could do the same here.
Don’t be us. There are flats of cherries that you can buy afterwards- don’t carry any out on your own!Entry fee is 1000 yen per person for 40 minutes. It is somewhat unclear from the signs/what they charged us on exactly how much kiddos cost, but they are CHEAP either way. They were kind enough to allow our babes in for free.
During those 40 minutes, you may eat as many cherries as you would like.The cherries are THICK right now, as of the last week of June. You will leave that area with a stomach ache if you eat the entire time- I promise. And they are SO good. I took photos most of the time, and still ended up feeling full when it was time to leave. 

Let me say it again, the cherries are SO good. Like, can I say it 4 times? I was shocked to even see some dark, rich bing cherries on a few trees. Do y’all realize how much those babies cost at the grocery store in Japan?!
The branches hang LOW, so even a kiddo as little as around 1.5 years old could easily reach the branches.

AND… the best part?

It’s all COVERED by greenhouses! It started absolutely pouring while we were picking, and all of us stayed nice and dry.

If you look closely, you can see the pouring rain in the background. SO nice that the trees in the picking area were covered, so the kids stayed totally dry.

Basically NO bugs. Grass is very short. Seriously the easiest place for a fun day trip with even very young kiddos. Vending machines are also located to the side if you end up going on a hot day. I would highly recommend this for ANY age.The drive from base is about 57 minutes without tolls, but it is a BEAUTIFUL drive. I am not sure if a toll route would change this, but I HIGHLY recommend the route that Google Maps took us while avoiding tolls. 

The Japanese asked us to come back as we left today, only after taking photos of our kids and gifting us a small bag of cherries for free. We will absolutely return. I’m tempted to go back again tomorrow, honestly.Make sure you check them out too, you won’t be disappointed.

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Cherry Blossom Guide – Misawa City, Aomori

My first cherry blossom season in Misawa was spent wandering about pretty aimlessly, trying to figure out where the best places to view cherry blossoms were. I stuck mostly to base, because I was really afraid of accidentally wandering somewhere that I wasn’t necessarily welcome. And don’t get me wrong there- the blossoms on base are totally worth driving around to see. They are so beautifully and strategically planted, and they are some of the trees that seem to bloom the soonest. As I have explored more of Misawa, I have found that very few places seem to be unwelcome to Americans, as long as you are respectful, clean up after yourself, and don’t let your kids run completely wild. On the contrary, the Japanese at the parks seem to absolutely adore respectful American kiddos.

Icho park last year, mid-week. (If you go on a weekday, or early in the morning, it is beautifully quiet here.)

Last year, I thought the only place to really see blooms was at the Statue of Liberty (Icho) Park. I missed out on some of the most gorgeous blooms, because I spent ALL my time there (also because I had mini sessions nonstop, which was AMAZING, but also so draining.) It definitely is one of the best. But I wish I would have known about all the available parks for blossom viewing within like 20 minutes of base, where to park, and where was the most kid-friendly.

My kiddos were sick this week, so I will be updating this post in the next couple days with more photos and more information about each park.
For now, here are some photos of VERY early blooms that I saw at a couple parks I have visited this week- which will be updated soon! (April 24 update.)


 Also, here are a few reminders for you about being kind to our Japanese hosts, please don’t take these tips lightly! They may be common sense to most, but I have seen them all happen, which is why I include them.

• Please don’t let your kids pick cherry blossoms or any flowers, for that matter (and don’t pick them yourself.) If you want ONE blossom for a photo or something, that is one thing. But these gorgeous blooms don’t last long, and it’s incredibly sad for me as a photographer to watch other kids stripping entire branches to throw them in the air for one photo, you know? Be smart, and realize that there are a lot of people trying to view these trees in a very tiny amount of time, and half the time a giant rain or winds will strip the branches, anyway. If you want blooms, pick up ones that have already fallen!

• If you go to a dog-friendly park, PICK UP AFTER THEM. Keep your dogs on a tight/close leash, don’t let them jump all over people. I’m a dog lover, but I am absolutely a supporter of keeping your dogs at home if they growl at people or easily escape a leash.

• Try to keep your kiddos under control. Parks are obviously for running and fun (I have a toddler, trust me, I get it,) but I have seen people be drilled in the head with soccer balls by American children at these parks. Realize that these are THE ONLY parks for local Japanese families, and we are visitors in THEIR country.


Lastly,
Komaki and Tateno are VERY close together and could easily be hit in the same day.
Swan and Icho Parks are also VERY close together.

Also, as a disclaimer- these are all Google Maps pins. I know sometimes the difference between Google Maps and Apple Maps can be huge.

1. Statue of Liberty Park (Icho/Oicho Park)

(40.610026, 141.439702)
TONS of blooms here. The entire park is covered. 

If you go early in the day, you can park in this lot that the pin takes you directly to. I have always been routed through a very tightly-packed residential area to find the park- it will seem like you are going the wrong way if you are routed this way too. This lot does fill up quickly though, so if it is filled, you will have to take a right out of the parking lot, and drive until you see a one-way street. This will take you to a loop that drives directly above the park (directly above the playgrounds.) When the actual parking lots are filled, overflow parking has always parked on the grass above the park on this loop. I personally do not park here unless I see a JN (non-Y plate) car already parked there, just to be sure it is okay.

• stroller friendly almost completely through, almost all of it is paved walkways
• great place for a picnic when it is not insanely busy
• HUGE State of Liberty
• playgrounds, swings
• completely open areas for kids to run
• giant roller slide
• dog friendly
• large and beautiful lake
• fishing friendly
• has restrooms

This is one of the very best parks to visit for lots and lots of cherry blossoms. There are even a few different kinds of blooms here.
That being said, it gets BUSY towards the end of the day, and especially towards the afternoon on the weekends. During full bloom, the place is sometimes PACKED. It’s sometimes hard to find a parking spot, and the parking in this park is a little squirrely sometimes. I recommend visiting Icho for SURE, but recommend going during the early morning, or on a weekday. (Sunrise in Icho is spectacular, you NEED to see it.)

2. Swan Park (Hachinohekitakyuryoshimoda Park)

(40.611883, 141.401523)
TONS of blooms here. The entire park is pretty much covered.

This is the one park I have not visited yet- I will update this description in a little more detail in the next few days. You can Google images, or search Misawa Asks for more info on this one. (Swans come out in the winter, so don’t expect to see them in the spring haha.)

NO DOGS ALLOWED
• large and beautiful lake
• playgrounds
• has restrooms

3. Train park (Central Park)

(40.683702, 141.370212)
Lots of blooms, small park but pretty heavy cherry blossom coverage 

This is a very small parking lot, and make sure that you do not park in the Library parking lot on the other side of the building. They are pretty clearly marked.
This one is a family favorite of ours- it has a huge stationary train that our toddler LOVES to walk through. Lots of playground equipment- but it does get relatively busy because it is such a small park, and it is right in the middle of town. The blossoms are gorgeous here, though! Great 5-10 min walk, or like a 1 minute drive from base.

• stroller friendly on the outside perimeter, but this one is so small you probably won’t need to bring strollers
• playground
•  walk-through train

4. Tateno Park

Main parking lot by scenic area- (40.6155691, 141.3323448)
Dirt lot by the playground side of the park-
(40.611648, 141.330215)
TONS of blooms here, and lots of different kinds of cherry blossoms. Do be aware that some trees bloom at different times, though- so all trees may not be in bloom at the same time

I personally park in the dirt lot by the lake (it is located directly next to a huge and beautiful shrine tucked into some pines. I am not 100% sure this is parking for the park, but it was closest to the park that I wanted to explore, and was not full- so I considered it safe to park there.)

• stroller friendly for the most part, some paths are not paved, but are smooth enough to navigate a stroller over
• playgrounds/play equipment, swings
NO DOGS ALLOWED
• large and beautiful lake
• tons of picnic areas/ grills available
• fishing friendly
• has restrooms

Lots of lower hanging branches here, and a VERY pretty picnic area in several places in the park.

I could be wrong about this park NOT being dog friendly, but I am almost certain I saw signs posted saying pets were not allowed. I will update if I find this to be incorrect.

I have only visited this park once, and have not gone to the half that is not right around the lake.
It was BEAUTIFUL when we visited, and would be perfect for a picnic. There are several tables, lots of places to sit down for a snack, and LOTS of places for kids to run. The place is absolutely huge, and if you have loud and crazy kids- I would say this or Train Park would be your best bet.

This park has 2-3 different areas to it, and it is the PERFECT spot for a picnic.

5. Komaki (Komakionsen Shibusawa Park / Hoshino Resort )

Train station side parking: (40.667054, 141.353918)
Hotel side parking:  (40.663124, 141.354045)
(I usually park at the hotel, then walk down to the other area near the train station.)
Less cherry blossoms, but enough to make it worth visiting- beautiful during literally any season/any month

• completely stroller friendly
• dog friendly
• foot onsen
• big red Japanese style bridge
• lots of Japanese style buildings & shrines
• large and beautiful lake

Buildings on the hotel’s side. The umbrellas were set up for a festival of some sort. There are often festivals held right on the lake.
Train station side, these gorgeous and HUGE white blooms appear before cherry blossoms are in full bloom.

Komaki is a little less kid-friendly in the fact that it is usually VERY quiet, and there aren’t open spaces for kids to run. When festivals are going on here, I would say it is much less quiet, though.
Komaki area has two small parks- one right by the train station, and one by the hotel and onsen. (The onsen is no longer open to non-hotel guests.)
The train station side of the park has a lot more open space, but is much smaller- if that makes sense- and generally has less people occupying it. There are also FAR less cherry blossoms on this side- if any. (I will update this with certainty when I return after full bloom in Misawa.)

Hotel side-
When you park in the parking lot that the pin takes you to, it is REALLY confusing the first time that you try to find the scenic area. You will park in the lot, and see a bunch of hotels & buildings. (If you pull up Google Maps, you will see a lake. If you simply navigate yourself to the lake, you will find the loop easily.)
If you don’t have Maps readily available, walk into the building area. You will take a right before the main building, and will walk past a couple parking lots on your right. Once you go under the arch, you have found the scenic loop, and the foot onsen is directly to your right, overlooking the lake.
Our kids love this park because they are pretty quiet and calm kiddos, and like to just take stroller walks. If you have children that are excessively rambunctious or like to run, I actually don’t recommend walking the loop with them, simply because Komaki isn’t a park, just a gorgeous paved loop around the hotel. The hotel is just kind enough to allow non-hotel guests in.
That being said, there are miniature ponies and horses that are very friendly, and the entire place is gorgeous and interesting for kids- just maybe not the best for toddlers or kiddos that can’t be relatively calm while outside.

The foot onsen is open to the public, but please be respectful and quiet when using it.

I would consider Komaki more of a scenic walk/ cultural experience vs. a park. Cherry blossoms are supposed to be gorgeous here when in full bloom, though.

There is also a small bamboo forest on the train station side. And there is always BBQ sauce on Henry’s shirt. Haha

I hope these recommendations help you some! Even if you don’t visit during cherry blossom season, these parks are our absolute favorites to spend time at in Misawa, and are the best to get your family outside of the gate for a day. Hope you enjoy them as much as we have!

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Both Hands

I grew up in the textbook definition of a small farm town. For eighteen years of my life, I lived where you could catch index finger waves every time you met another car on the single lane highway. The one fast food drive thru in town would recognize my voice or vehicle, and ask “the usual?” always around 3:17pm on my drive home from school. The river was a 15 minute drive away, but driving to a mall was an all-day ordeal.

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18 year old Em, providing the Valedictory address to our class of sixty-or-seventy-some.

My boyfriend was from a rival high school about 28 miles away, and our houses were only about 5 miles apart. We dated through college, and I will forever be proud to say that I married my high school sweetheart. Businesses in town were small, people were kind, and the nights were quiet. There were some generally awful people mixed in, as will be in any place you live, but for the most part, it was a beautiful thing to live in a population of just a little over 2,000.

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An oldie, but goodie for your viewing. We had been dating for around 2 years at this point. Our first official school dance.

 

A lot of this small-town awareness and kindness left my memory when my husband and I moved around 3 hours away to a town of around 50,000- maybe close to 100,000 when you include the suburbs. To some, this is still a small town, but for me, it was the biggest move of my life. Finally, I lived in a town with a Target, and it was only 7 minutes from our apartment.

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Our last photo outside of our first home together in Joplin, Missouri.

We loved the new town, the new found freedoms that retail convenience brought, and the new friends we found in this town. Don’t get me wrong, Joplin will forever hold a very dear place in my heart, and the friends that we left behind there are some of the best people I have met in my twenty-three years of life, but Joplin also provided me my first real taste of how unkind human beings can be. It was my college town, my first years on my own, and my first chance to see exactly how corporate, big America functions on a daily basis.

I so thankfully graduated with enough scholarships to cover all 4 years of my post-secondary education. So before Drew and I were engaged, I was just a college kid lucky enough to only want a job for a little extra gas money to make it home on the weekends. In October of our first year in Joplin, I applied at probably 40 different places in town, and immediately received a call back from Kohl’s, looking for holiday hires. I accepted a position as a temporary entry-level floor associate, was kept on permanently after the holiday season, and got my first experiences in retail.

Over the first two years I worked at Kohl’s, I was promoted a handful of times until I finally accepted a position in management. Still to this day, I have nothing but good things to say about the company, my co-workers, and the management at the store. Seriously, the people that work there and the company itself FAR outweigh the cons I’ll talk about shortly. But it was in this position that I realized just how awful people can be to a complete stranger.

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My coworkers from Kohl’s hosted my baby shower, we attended each other’s weddings, birthday parties, and showers, and I cried big ugly tears when our family moved. These are my people, and I love them dearly.

I managed the customer service department for a while, which meant I got a LOT of phone calls, a LOT of “can I speak to the manager”s, and a LOT of threats to call corporate with my full name on their tongues. Sometimes it was hard for me to separate the angry yelling of a 40-something year old woman from my own self-worth. The lack of a $4 savings that some individuals would get absolutely irate about made me question if people were inherently just really, really crappy humans. I was often called stupid if I counted back change wrong. I was often called a liar if I told a customer a price wasn’t what they thought they saw. I was once even called a bitch when I asked a woman to leave the store after she THREW a pile of clothes at me for telling her we had sold out of her size. Daily, I had men and women come through my line, and not once say a single word to me due to the fact that they were talking on their phones or buried in a post on social media. I had days that I desperately needed a warm hello from a customer, and didn’t even get so much as eye contact. Let me tell you guys, if you work retail, customer service, or food service anywhere in the states, from all I can see and tell- you are a saint.

After getting married, we moved to a suburb of the city in hopes for a little quieter atmosphere. Unfortunately we often found flashing headlights on our street corner, loud banging/kicking at our door in the middle of the night, and possessions missing from our car or truck in the mornings. In the four years we lived there, we only met one set of our eight neighbors. I feared taking my baby out of our SUV if it was dark already, and I called 911 and the police station more times during our stay there than I have in the rest of my twenty-two years combined. My friends houses were broken into, my wallet was stolen twice, and we had to lock our cars even if we were just running quickly into a gas station. We trusted very few people, and we spoke regularly to even fewer.
(Please don’t get me wrong, Joplin is a beautiful and wonderful place to live… this is just the worst of the things we experienced in our part of town, and is just sometimes the nature of a bigger city.) But after around 5 years there, I cried myself to sleep most nights. It was a hard place for me to be after so many years in a town where your neighbors were your family, and you left your purse in your car overnight to find it unscathed the next morning. I wanted something different; I wanted a new existence. I wanted people that knew my name again, or at the very least made eye contact with me before they walked away from my register at work. I was convinced that the only place for us was back in our hometown of 2,000 people- where we could raise our son to graduate high school in a class of around sixty-five other students. But, when my husband and I moved the next time, it would be overseas.

At 18, I thought I would live in my hometown for the rest of my 80+ years of life. Never in a million years would I expect to be 23 and sitting in my new apartment in Japan. It’s funny how God takes us to the last place in the world we would ever think we would want to be, and shows us just how wrong our assumptions are most of the time.

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Even if nothing else made me love this country, the Pacific coastline 100% would.

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When I boarded our plane at the coastline, and said goodbye to America, I expected another Joplin experience. I expected to cry often because our families are 6,000 miles away, and I expected to ache for the states- especially for my hometown. I expected to find more people who were too caught up in their own lives to care in the slightest about mine. And again, don’t get me wrong- I miss my hometown and my sweet family terribly, and I miss those dirt roads and the quietness of Southern Missouri. But what I have found in Japan so far has left me absolutely astounded.

The Japanese people have a way of existing that makes me yearn to be like them.

From the first time I was bowed to, to the first time an elderly Japanese couple stopped in the middle of the mall to give my cranky toddler son a cookie they had just bought for themselves, I find myself never letting the corners of my mouth drop in this country. I could go on and on all day about how incredible this experience has been so far, but I will tell you the one thing that catches me off guard still- almost a full month after we have arrived.

Upon my first trip to a grocery store, I brought our items to the front for checkout while my toddler swatted at everything possible on the counter. The sweet cashier tried her best to make conversation with me, and I half-heartedly tried my best to reply while doing a million other things- though the extent of my Japanese so far includes “hi”, “thank you”, and “how much is this?” I struggled to pull the correct amount of money out of my wallet, while trying to text my husband who was on the other side of the store waiting for me. At the end of the transaction, I experienced a gesture that I never had before in the states. When she handed me my change, the bags, and the receipt, she fully extended both of her hands to do so.

My thoughts at first were probably similar to any other American’s. “Ah. That’s kind of cool. But so what? It’s a customary thing, right? Just a difference from America? A cultural thing? It isn’t even THAT big of a deal.”

Yes. And those thoughts are precisely what make my heart hurt. The attention and care that she showed me were out of the ordinary for me, though they are a daily occurrence here. I realized in that moment, that I could not accept what she handed to me with both of my hands, simply because my hands were full already. I gripped my phone, illuminated from the conversation I was attempting to have while speaking to her. My keys were intertwined between my fingers in an effort to have my car key separated and ready before we walked into the cold. I had held the receipt, immediately and instinctively trying to check the amount I was charged. I could barely carry the bags she handed me, because I was already so engrossed in everything else that I was trying to do in that checkout line. During the drive home, I reflected on the fact that I was culturally so unprepared for the full attention that cashier gave me.

In this city, the public transportation is quiet. The people on the trains always use headphones to avoid disturbing others. The only people sitting are the elderly, the pregnant, or those with children. Others only sit when there is room, and they often stand up for others when they board the bus or train. People rarely walk and talk on their phones. You see very few phones on sit-down restaurant tables. The service at every restaurant, every store, and every gas station is impeccable. The hosts try to help you understand signs, menus, directions. They attempt to explain what your food is. They tell you the secrets on how to eat it. People notice your baby/toddler and accommodate you when you are struggling. They give your toddler a cookie they themselves just paid several dollars for. Nobody in this town locks their doors. Merchants leave items on the streets overnight. The people here are so kind, but more importantly- the people here are so present.

Since arriving, I have noticed myself putting down my phone more (aside from snapping photos of everything and attempting to translate words and signs with Google translate, of course) and have found myself trying to be present in my attempted conversations with the Japanese locals. Even in my hometown, while the pace is much slower, I can’t say that the people are as present as they are here. It is an incredible feeling to have a human- who is wholly uninvested in you personally- hand you something with both hands, make eye contact, smile, and even bow to you as you leave.

It is so funny how God can take a die-hard hometown-forever kind of girl like me, and thoroughly convince her in just a month that everyone in America needs to leave the United States for a little while just to get some perspective, but I fully believe this now. I wish that every person could spend a week in Japan, just to realize what a shallow person you can be at times when it comes to your attention and who and what you give it to.

Regardless of political view, regardless of gender, regardless of race- these humans we do life with and around deserve our attention. They never deserve a half-hearted conversation, and they never deserve to be spoken down to for something that is completely out of their control. I wish we all could remember that every single person we encounter is a child of the King. They are made in His image, and they deserve our respect. These beautiful people in Japan very rarely even know the name of Jesus, and they get it so much more than I- a hometown bible-belt Christian- ever did.

I never realized what a difference it makes to have someone hand you something with both hands, and to have someone fully invest in your presence before them, even if only for a mere 2 minutes. But this is the attitude of Christ- the One who understands, the One who listens, and the One who is always fully invested in us. Attention and investment like this is somewhat startling, but it is remarkably wonderful. Make conversation, sincerely care about another person’s existence, make eye contact.

Offer your attention. Offer both hands.

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