Nagano: A tale of public baths, apples, and MONKEYS

Naganooooo! At last.

Wednesday, October 25, 2006

Everyone met up at Kaihin Makuhari outside of the building IES is in at 8:30 (ahhhh early), where we had two buses ready to go. We loaded up our stuff and got on the buses. The bus I was on was totally the cool bus (hahaha), we just tended to have more fun amusing people than it seemed the other bus had (and some unsavory characters like Jakub, but you know). On the way there Lisa and I listened to the Avenue Q soundtrack (the good songs, anyway) most of which she hadn't heard, which was good times. :D We stopped twice along the way at service areas (the second time for lunch, yumm katsu curry), where we quickly discovered the awesomeness of fruit-flavored ice cream. Oh myyy, blueberry & vanilla was the first one I got, and then apple! Sooo goooooddd.




Audrey and I at the lunch stop

We stopped at Matsumoto Castle, one of those famous Japanese landmarks that I never seem to really know that much about before I go to them. It was cool too, and a lot like Himeji Castle that we went to in January. Taking off your shoes (and carrying them in little plastic bags), climbing up the steep wooden stairs to reach the very top of the castle, etc etc. It was fun wandering around the grounds after we went through the castle, though.


The ceremonial Pokemon of Matsumoto Castle. Okay, not really. But what IS this thing?


The castle


Me in front of it! Looking spectacularly awful, sigh!


Our group picture




After the castle exploration... Aly, my roommate!


I am a master photographer


Hahaha Hyung-Hye


...ambushed by Casey and Aubrey




scary Allie!


hahaha Audrey

Then we got back on the bus and drove the rest of the way to our ryokans (Japanese-style inns) in Nagano. About 3/4 of our group was in one ryokan, Hatsunoyu, and then about 15 of us were at the other, Matsuya. Which was totally better! Lisa, Anna, Audrey and I were in one room and it was very nice. Just like the ryokans we stayed at in Hiroshima and Kyoto, we had a large tatami area where we laid out our futons and also had a low table, and then off to the side by the window was an area we could partition off with sliding paper-window doors that had a little table and our sink and fridge. Hyung-Hye and Ishikawa-san's room was across the way, as was Aly, Allie and Lauren's. It was very traditional, so of course we left our shoes at the downstairs entry area and then put on slippers to climb up two flights to our rooms.

After arrival, we went down to dinner, which was in the basement area, and was just like the traditional dinners we had in the Hiroshima ryokan, low tables and cushions on the floor, with many different dishes in their own special bowls/plates. I don't remember what we had that night but all our food there was really, really good, and I enjoyed every meal a lot. :D


yummm

After dinner, we went up to our room and put on our complimentary yukata robes and went downstairs to use the onsen in our ryokan. Which turned out to be REALLY small, like I went with my roommates + Allie, so that was 5 people and it was a tight fit in the tiny little tub. (Later they switched the men's and women's sides and the other side was definitely a LOT nicer and bigger!) It was their first time doing the onsen thing, so they were a little nervous but then we all just DID IT and it was fine.

After that we just chilled in our room until bedtime. :)

Thursday, October 26th, 2006

We all got up and went down to breakfast at 8, which was delicious as always, which made up for the ungodly hour. After that, we left to get back on the bus...


The gorgeous scenery we passed by walking to the bus from our ryokan

...and went to Zenkoji Temple (yay, the only temple! Via, by the way, this beautiful mountain route--like, a giant double-car highway arcing up into the mountains, so cool) which is a famous temple in Nagano. There was this "monk tour" thing there, which was a completely dark passage under the temple that you wander along blindly. Even though I had been told what a monk tour was going to entail beforehand, when I went down those stairs I was still thinking of it as a 'tour by monks' and was thus EXTREMELY surprised to find myself in complete darkness, feeling my way along an enclosed tunnel. Oh, that was fun. And by fun I mean terrifying. Adam was in front of me and Lisa behind me, and I definitely grabbed onto their hands at parts. Finally I made it out. OHTHANKGOD. But now reading the Wikipedia article about it, we were supposed to find and touch this key thing to 'gain enlightenment.' I felt no key!!! Now I feel cheated. I suffered through that crazy thing and I didn't even do the thing you're supposed to do!

After that we just wandered around the grounds. Someone caught a huge praying mantis and we all crowded around to take pictures and watch it. ...Not that that went on for 10 minutes, or anything. Then this adorable group of like 60 kindergarteners paraded past us and we had fun waving to them and hearing their "Herro!" greetings, hahahha.


Temple entrance


Grounds


The praying mantis that amused us all a bit longer than it should have


Adorable kindergarten kids!


"Herroo!"


Lisa tying her fortune to the thingy


More kids + pigeons


Pigeons... everywhere


Lisa scaring the pigeons away. The other Lisa and I did the exact same thing a couple minutes later. It was GLORIOUS.


Kiddies huddling around the incense pot thing

Then we got back on the bus and drove up to the place where we made soba noodles (and that was our lunch. Hmmmm. I like soba well enough, it's not my favorite, but ONLY that for lunch?). Soba is one of Nagano's yuumei na mono (things it's famous for), along with fruits (blueberries and apples). My group was my roommates and we totally rolled out some soba dough and then chopped it into noodles with the special knife. Then the people took our noodles and cooked them for us and we ate them. Pretty good!


My group!


The other groups!


We started with this


and after adding liquids and stuff it became dough!


Eating tiime! Casey and Matt


Lisa, Audrey

Even better was the HUGE SLIDE right outside the place. As someone (possibly Matt) said "I like soba. I like slides. Why not combine them?!" So everyone went down the slide multiple times and it was lots of fun.



Then we drove to the ninja museum/amusement park place. It's hard to find words for this place aside from "TOTALLY AWESOME." I was skeptical cause I don't think ninjas are the coolest things ever, but it ROCKED. It was pretty much just this little park-sized area with a bunch of buildings and fun ninja-themed games and activities, like a rickety suspension bridge, a circular tower building that wobbled from side to side, a 'trick house' with secret doors and trapdoors and mazes that you had to find your way out of (which was HARD!), and just all sorts of really cool, really fun things. I highly, highly recommend it.


walking up to the place


Ninja dolls on wires moving through the air


Hahaha Lisa and I


Anna on the climbing wall


Anna and Aubrey on the cool suspension bridge!




Tightrope walking


On the bridge! But wait! We're in the middle, vulnerable and alone!


So Casey...


...and Matt ambush us. Like boys on a playground. honestly!


Finally, we enter the Karakuri-zashiki (Trick House). We are greeted with a lame ninja robot.


Later we discover a 35 DEGREE TILTED ROOOOMMM! Oh, we are all such children. But it was so fun!!






Look! Both of my roommates are in this picture. Aly on the far right, and Brette in the middle. ENDO-RYO, REPREZENT!

Of course, when we all piled back onto the bus we realized what IES had done. They had let us run around and get all tired out and exhausted, just like you do with little kids! And to top it all off, on the way back to the ryokans we watched a movie! They kept us distracted with a movie! Pirates of the Caribbean (dubbed in Japanese, so extra hilarious), but still. How dare they.

When we got back we had an hour or so to kill before dinner, so we put on our yukata and hit up some onsen. In the area there are 9 different onsen we can visit for free, so we went to three or four of them. They turned out to be really tiny places that could barely fit all 7 of us that went, and the water was EXTREMELY hot and turned all of our skin lobster red, but it was still fun. We had a little bandanna thing that we could get stamped at each place, so we collected stamps for that too :)

Then dinnertime, and bed cause we were all really tired!

Friday, October 27th, 2006

Thursday was just so awesome, there was no way Friday could compete. Sadly. So yeah, you know, the drill, get up, breakfast (though I had a pre-breakfast onsen shower, which was wonderful since it had been switched to the other side which is MUCH nicer and bigger and I had time to soak in the tub a little bit and it was sooooo nice and peaceful!), get in the bus and go! Our first stop was apple picking at an apple farm, which was pretty cool (if muddy) and I got like 4 apples. Then we just stood around eating them. I don't usually just eat apples plain, since the skin is pretty hard for me to eat, but I toughed it out and was rewarded with a lovely crisp apple taste. Fresh picked off the tree. Yummmm :)






The digital macro setting on my camera? Amazing. I taught Trisha and Priscilla how to use theirs, too. It is just wonderful.






My delicious apple

Then we went to a different area of the same farm whatever place and made mochi (rice paste stuff). That pretty much entailed putting some rice in this giant wooden bucket and then pounding it down with a mallet repeatedly until it gave in and formed a gooey paste. First the guys showed us how and then we all got to try (I did not). Then after we made it they brought it out and they had the stuff you can roll it in or roll inside it to eat it. It was pretty tasty but most of the stuff you mix with mochi is gross to me. At that point this was all seeming to take WAY TOO LONG for me, and I was bored, and luckily there was an abandoned shrine across the street that Lisa discovered so I went and explored that, and it was pretty and peaceful, yay.






Mochi and stuff to dip the mochi in. I only tried that black-and-white stuff, and it was actually pretty good.


The shrine!




I don't think this video can really truly explain the amazing sense of tranquility that was going on here... but it can maybe give you a good idea. :)
Ahh, I was so tired already by that point in the day (only 11 am). I wanted to sleeeep! But no, we must keep going!

Our next stop was Fruitsland (FURUUTSURANDO!) where we had a lunch consisting of a bunch of dishes all centered around one thing: mushrooms. Mushroom rice, mushroom miso soup, mushrooms all on their own, mushrooms mushrooms mushrooms! Well.. yay. I hate mushrooms. And we were not asked beforehand if any of us had problems with mushrooms. But it was okay, I could eat the non-mushroomy parts of the rice. Then we explored Fruitsland, which was just this huge store selling every possible product having to do with fruits, namely apples and blueberries. It was, in a word, AMAZING. I got omiyage (souvenirs) for my host family and for work there, and a bottle of blueberry ramune (YES) for myself. Oooohhh what a GREAT place. They of course had the ice cream so I got the sakuranbo (cherry) flavor. YUM!


Cherry ice cream!!!

Then I explored the (Buddhist) cemetery across the street with Priscilla and Lisa. Japanese cemeteries are so cool! All Buddhist, with a family shrine and place to burn incense! Japanese are so weird about religion. To make a pretty big but also, I suspect, largely true generalization... that whole "born Shinto, live Christian, die Buddhist" thing is so true. They just really don't care; as with everything (food, words), they import what they like, mix it all up together with what they already had and that's what works for them. It's something rooted so deep in the culture that I doubt it will ever change, no matter how many Christian missionaries are sent.

Then back on the bus...


Chris after buying perhaps a few too many apple souvenirs

After that we went to this little downtown area and went to like three museums, all devoted in some way to Hokusai Katsushika, the inventor of the word "manga" and the guy who made that famous Japanese painting of the giant wave about to crush the tiny boats. Of which we saw the original at one of the museums. yeaaahhhh!


Uhh... yeah. It was a mistake for one of the museums to have stuffed animals set out, because we definitely played with them.

Then we did a tour of a sake brewery, which was kiiiinda boring!


I got this pretty picture out of it, though. Digital macro = so great.

Then back on the bus, and home! Nap attempt (it wound up us giggling about funny things people had said on the bus instead) and then dinner, which was ridiculously delicious even though it was probably 'Western themed.' Hamburger + carrots + broccoli + potato wedges. yessss

At 8 there was this karaoke thing IES organized, and even though I thought there wouldn't be many people there, in reality just about everyone turned out.


Lots of people posing at the beginning.

Ryan and Allie got us started with the Japanese Sailor Moon opening theme song (Ryan WAY more into it than Allie, hahaha), and it was just downhill from there!


Audrey, Ryan, and Anna during "A Whole New World" hahaha

The best part was making SHIN-SAN (one of the IES employees) sing, which he did, and it was fantastic.


Shin-san!!! I also have a recording of him singing here.

We stayed there for about an hour or so and then sat in our room talking for a while before going to bed.

Saturday, October 28, 2006

Got up, breakfast, finished putting our stuff together and left our ryokan!! saadddd.


Matsuya Ryokan!

We put our stuff on our main bus and then boarded little mini-buses to go to the MONKEY ONSEN PARK. We soon saw why; the only way up there is a narrow one-lane mountain path! Yes, ONE LANE. If another car is coming the opposite way, you both stop and one of you pulls over into one of the little side areas they have at points along the way. Scary!!

Then once you get to the monkey park you have to walk the rest of the way on another narrow path. Wow, inaccessible much? But so worth it. That place is freakin' amazing. Monkeys! We got there right as all the monkeys were descending down into the depths of the valley (the place is called Jigokudani, or Hell Valley, because of all the hot water) and it was so cool to see them all scampering down, coming to get their food, go take a dip in the special monkeys-only onsen pool... soooo cooooool. There was nothing separating us and the monkeys, they ran right by our feet. Sometimes I really love how Japan has its special foods and special animals in each different part of the country. I guess we have that too in the U.S., but it seems so much more celebrated here.


monkeeeyyssssss!












Their food is in the tubes! They have to work to get it out. :D


And they have their own personal bath








Me with my monkey friends



Then we hiked back down, drove back down on the mini-buses, then boarded our normal buses again and headed for home! On the way we stopped at this taiko drum studio place owned by this guy who appears to be a star in the world of taiko drumming and even performed in the opening ceremonies at the Nagano Olympics. He showed us his drum collection and then we went down to the basement and had a drumming jam session. I've really done this soooo many times by now, the whole taiko drum thing, that's it's lost all novelty for me, but it was still kind of cool. I was glad to get back on the bus though. After another 4 hours or so, including a truly spectacular drive through Tokyo in which we witnessed the most beautiful view of Tokyo Tower and a breathtaking ride across the Rainbow Bridge (so, so beautiful. I only ever see Tokyo close-up so it was amazing to see it zoomed-out and panoramic), we were home! finallyyy. :)

In conclusion, Nagano was just amazing and I think everyone had a great time. Great field trip, good times :D