Golden Week pt. 2

My vacation is pretty much over. Back to regular life at school tomorrow. I am looking forward to getting back into the grind. Although I had an absolute blast over the past 9 days, it ended up being a little expensive. I also need to get back into a schedule. The past week has been pretty rough on my sleep schedule and was a bit stressful at times with all of the buses and trains, sleeping in different places every night, and the ever present feeling of not really knowing where I am or how to speak Japanese. The last of which I have started to get used to in a way. It is amazing how I can communicate so well without saying any real words now, I just wave my arms around and mime things while trying to piece together a few of what may or may not be actual Japanese words. While I am still pretty bad with reading and speaking, I think my listening is a little better. This trip helped me a good bit since there weren’t really any English speakers around aside from the people I was traveling with, and not all of them were really all that fluent in English either.

Despite the difficulty with the language, I think this trip went very well. We saw a good bit of Japan in a relatively short amount of time. We went from the mountains in Wakayama, to the beach, to Fuji, then to another beach in Shizuoka. Last night I went out in Osaka for my friends birthday, and was talking with some people there about my trip. A few of my Japanese friends were jealous, some of them said that they hadn’t even seen these places, even though they had lived in Japan for basically their entire lives. I guess that is the way locals are everywhere though. There are a lot of places I have not been in America, even in the DMV area, that many of my foreign friends have been to. I hope to change that when I get back home. For some reason I am completely OK with aimlessly wandering around alone in a foreign country, but in the US I feel like there needs to be a special occasion with friends involved in order for me to go explore a new area. I feel bad that I seem to have explored more places and cultures in other countries, but still know so little about the different areas and cultures within the United States. Like I said, I hope to change that when I get back. I really enjoy these excursions in other countries, and I imagine they would be much more fun if I was somewhere I could actually speak to people in my native language. I would have had lot less fun if I didn’t have anyone with me that could speak Japanese.

Looking back, I did a lot of cool things on this trip. I did some hiking, crossing some pretty massive suspension bridges which crossed valleys, like 150ft above the river below. We also hiked up a road in the pouring down rain (got picked up half way by some strangers) to plant rice on top of a mountain top. We drank beer in hot spring pools which were only about 20 yards from a flowing river. I fished, although it was horribly unsuccessful. I ate whale, several times. Fried whale is better than raw whale, whale jerky wasn’t too bad either. I wouldn’t consider any of them a favorite food of mine though. I saw a whale show, I saw a dolphin farm… yes a dolphin farm. I saw the tallest waterfall in Japan. I camped by Mt Fuji. I drank some choice Japanese craft beer. I even got to catch a few waves surfing one morning. Even the traveling part was pretty cool…aside from some frustrations with (not so) trustworthy navigators. (I know you are reading this :)…) We rented a car one day, and had a nice road trip. We even rode a Japanese bullet train, which I think is my new favorite mode of travel. 150-200 mph of BYOB fun, on the way to your destination. I really did have a great trip.

The morning after my last post, we went to Nachi waterfall. It is the tallest waterfall in Japan. It was huge, and like many other beautiful natural wonders in Japan, it was made a shrine. There were monks walking around with burning incense. There were also these little pots with wishing fires (not sure of the technical name but you throw a stick in that has some writing on it and make a wish.) in them. This shrine really took the wishing to the next level with their fire. Most of the other shrines I have been to so far just have little wooden boxes, into which you throw some coins and sometimes a piece of wood with your wish written on it… Boring… Fire is much more fun, even if it doesn’t help the probability of my wish actually coming true. Apparently fire is a bit of a wonder in Japan. When we were camping by Fuji, we were getting ready to BBQ in a little pit by the cabin. A family was already there grilling there dinner on a standard, lame ass charcoal grill. When I got our fire going everyone seemed so surprised. The people I was with were clapping, and the charcoal grillers next to us came over to check out my fire like it was something they had only ever seen on TV. Their little kids were running around all excited like they just chugged some mountain dew. I was a little shocked. Fires have always been such a normal part of life growing up, I thought it was like that everywhere. Who doesn’t know how to make a fire?

The night camping (we actually stayed in a little one room cabin) was cool. We stayed up pretty late drinking around the fire and hanging out by the lake. We probably frustrated a few other people in the area with our loud obnoxious singing and yelling, but no one seemed to hold it against us the next day. We were planning to stay at the cabin for 2 nights, but the next morning we couldn’t find fishing rods to rent, and there want much else to do there so we decided to rent a car and make a trip to the beach.

The beach was awesome. We stayed at a really cool little hostel/guest house. It was ran by a Japanese guy and his Dutch wife. They both spoke English, so we had a nice time talking with them. The guy was really cool, he had a pretty strong Australian accent to his English and had a much more relaxed personality then other Japanese people I have met. He rented me a surfboard and found a wetsuit for me to use and gave me some nice advice on where to go. The next morning I woke up around 4:30 to go do some sunrise surfing (they don’t do daylight savings time here). I had a blast despite all of the people and my cheap rental board. The surf beach I went to was about a half mile long stretch of sand between two huge rock cliffs, it was the coolest place I had ever surfed before. The water was so clear you could easily see fish swimming around about 6-7ft down on the bottom. The waves were only about waist high, but they were nice enough to get some good rides in. The amount of people there was the main problem. I have never surfed anywhere so crowded. I had to give up waves to people so many times, and I had to bail on a few good ones too because someone was in the way or someone cut me off. I started counting people in the water, I got to 60 and stopped. This was only in about a half mile of beach. Crazy. There were some really good surfers there though. I was somewhat surprised by the surf culture in Japan. I never expected it to be such a big deal. My morning session was probably the best few hours of my whole trip. I really had been wanting to catch some surf since before I even left the US. After living at the beach and being able to go everyday I really really missed it. I am still smiling about it, even though it hurts to move my face. I got soooo sunburnt. I was out in the water for 4 hours and didn’t use any sunscreen. My face was almost purple. It was pretty bad, even for me.

Last night at my friends party, someone told me I had something on my lip. I thanked them for telling me and went to wipe it off. As soon as I touched my lip I knew it was peeling skin. GROSS. I started laughing and told her it was just peeling skin from my sunburn. I wasn’t too embarrassed, but she definitely was. She just kept apologizing, like she had just ran over my puppy. I actually started to feel bad for HER.

The party was a blast though, despite my leather face. A crew of about 30 of The birthday boy, Koichi’s, friends all met up and went bar hopping. I made several new friends, whom I am sure I will be hanging out with again in the future. I also had my first experience at a video game bar. It is exactly what it sounds like. I played super smash brothers on N64 while drinking a pint of beer in a bar. There were 5 or 6 other video game systems set up as well, each with a solid selection of games. I was a little disappointed they didn’t have FIFA or Madden, but Golden Eye and Super Smash Bros. took me back to the old elementary school days, when I would sit on the living room floor and waste hours of my life. We had to sneak the beer back then though… (I wish there was a funnier way to say how that was just a joke, but…. Mom, don’t worry. That last bit was a joke.)

OH! I skipped the part of this trip where I visited a whale hunting village. There was a museum there detailing the history of whale hunting. It was really cool. We saw a whale show (like a dolphin show but not as cool) the whales were not killer whales or anything, just small little gray whales, that really just looked like big fat dolphins with an extra chromosome. We took a little kayak tour too. It was pretty boring because I kept having to slow down for the little Japanese lady who acted as our “guide”. We were only allowed to paddle around a small little bay, we didn’t go much farther than 500 yards away from the place where we launched and we had to talk her into letting us attempt that extremely risky feat. We did get to see some dolphin farms up close though. It was kind of cruel. There were like 4-5 dolphins in pens in the middle of the bay just swimming around in circles. The government increased regulation on dolphin hunting and is encouraging the use of dolphin farming instead, which I think is way less humane…. but what do I know. I haven’t eaten any dolphin, not sure if I want to… Let’s be serious, I will probably give it a try at some point. I did try some other types of whale. As I said, none were really all that delicious. It was very interesting to see how much of a part of the culture whaling and dolphin(ing?) is in Japan. It isn’t only about food. It is a pretty serious industry here, employing many people and providing a range of products, not just meat. I am not really for one side or the other on this whaling controversy (It has been in the news a lot here). I don’t really enjoy the meat all that much, but it was cool to have tried it. I wont talk much more about it on here because I am sure there are some of you that would rather not hear about it, and there isn’t much more to tell about it. It was interesting to see though, something new and different from anything I have experienced at home, much like many other experiences I have had here in Japan.

Well, I am sure I have left out some other fun parts of my vacation story, but I am sure I will have some other stories coming up soon. I am already trying to figure out what I want to do for my next vacations. There is still so much of this country to explore. I will be sure to keep you updated. For now I am signing off. Thanks for reading, and thanks for sharing. This blog has been getting a lot more hits recently. I almost had 200 clicks in one week last week. Thanks again, and sorry about any grammar/spelling mistakes; I will recheck this in the morning when I put on my English teacher hat. Have a nice week everyone.