We meet again. Thank you all for reading…I am not sure if “all” is an appropriate word to use any more, due to the decline in page views, but thank you just the same. Obviously I am the one to blame for your lack of interest. Unfortunately things are not so shiny and new here any more. I am hoping to find some shiny new things to write about soon. I have not made a trip in a while, and that is something that needs to happen soon. I have met many people along there travels and heard all of there stories, but it is becoming high time I made a venture of my own.
My main goal for this adventure has always been to see and experience as much as possible, but I feel I may have lost sight of this and become a bit complacent. I have been talking about making a weekend trip to somewhere, namely Tokyo or Hiroshima, for the past few weeks, but things keep coming up and I have yet to really look into either trip too much. To be honest the only research I really need to do is figuring out how to get there and where I am going to stay. The rest of my itinerary can be figured out en route to the decided destination city. As I mention these trips to my friends, many say they want to join me, and to an extent I have been using their lack of input/apathetic approach towards this “team” trip as an excuse to procrastinate with planning. However, as I am writing this I am coming to re-realize that if I really want to have a good time and see everything I want to see (which is a lot) within my ever shrinking window of opportunity, I can’t carry on like this. I am still not sure what exactly I want to do first but I have to start with something.
This coming weekend will not be the weekend I get back to my To-Do List though. This weekend I am scheduled to participate in a big water gun fight in Osaka. I am curious to see how it turns out. I haven’t been in an organized water gun fight since elementary school, but I think it will be a good time. My friend Claudia is planning it. She always seems to have things like this organized just enough to work well, but not so organized it takes the fun away. It should be a fun day. After the water gun fight, it is my turn to cook dinner for the crew. A few weeks ago I was welcomed into this circle of friends over a family dinner of lasagna. One of the conditions of my new membership was that I cook for the next family dinner. I am hoping to showcase my skills for them. Claudia has a legitimate kitchen, with an oven, and plenty of counter space. I am actually really stoked to cook in a real kitchen again. I am thinking of making Chicken parmesan, one of my favorite things to make, and someone requested it… so why not?
So I am not traveling this weekend, but I think it will be well worth it. I guess I have been complaining a bit much about my lack of travel. I have been able to make several day trips over the past few weeks. This weekend I went to Nara on Sunday then Kyoto on Monday. In Nara we did the usual deer feeding and temple viewing, but then we went somewhere new and exciting which was very new to me. My friend has been traveling around the world starting in his native Turkey, then through Russia, Mongolia, Korea, and now Japan. When we made plans to go to Nara he asked me if I had been to Nara Dreamland, which is a theme park in Nara that was shut down in 2006 due to a serious decline in visitors. Initially, I thought this guy was kind of crazy to want to go there since it was closed, but then he explained it was a goal of his along his journey so I followed along. It was really cool. Apparently this theme park is on several internet lists of the “Top abandoned places in the world” along with Chernobyl, some underwater city ruins, and tons of other cool places. We had read online that it was a bit risky to go in because there were security guards on patrol during the day who could get us in some trouble, but we decided to go anyway to scout it out so we could come back another time before sunrise, before the guards came on duty. We walked all around the perimeter and saw a bunch of holes in the fence we could get through. It really didn’t seem like they were putting forth much effort to keep people out, so we decided to slip through the fence for a little peek over the hill to survey what we might be able to check out the next time. We had to climb a really steep hill then hop another fence before we got to the main park area. We were sneaking around, and got a few pictures of some cool things. When we came upon a massive water park area all I could think about was how nice it would be if the park was open and I could cool off with a ride down the massive slide… but then we had to leave in a hurry when we heard a walkie talkie squelch just around the corner about 50 yards away. It may seem kind of dumb to some of you but I am really intrigued by this place. When we got back to my apartment we looked up some other pictures of this place. It looks awesome. I will include cool video of the deserted park below. I hope to go back and eventually get some pics of my own.
Yesterday (Monday) was another beautiful day. The weather is continuing to get hotter, unless it is rainy. Yesterday was probably close to 90*F where we were walking around in Kyoto. I think we ended up walking over 20km (12.5 miles) by the end of the day. We went to several shrines and temples and some other cool places in between. The coolest place we went was Fushimi Inari Shrine. It was a hill with a bunch of shrines on it, and one big one at the peak where you could look out over most of Kyoto. The shrines themselves were not that cool, but the walking from shrine to shrine is the real attraction. There are tons of bright orange tori gates arching over the pathways, in a lot of places they are so close together you cant even squeeze between them. Like a huge fence or pergola. It was really cool. I read that there are over 10,000 of these tori at this sight. I thought it was more than that in all honesty. We seemed to be in the shade of these gates for our entire hike, but even in the shade I was sweating bullets. After we came back down the hill I was dying of thirst so we took a break for some water and green tea ice cream, before continuing our trek to some other places in the city.
We passed up on some temples and gardens we had to pay to enter, but we were able to see some really cool things elsewhere. I was pretty amazed by this monster aqueduct we saw. It didn’t look like anything else I have seen in Japan so far. It looked like a much more European structure, it was made of brick and was trimmed in some interesting brickwork designs. I got some cool pictures of it, and was really tempted to jump into the stream we saw flowing along when we reached the top, but I resisted. After the aqueduct we grabbed a beer from the convenience store and sat on a park bench for a while relaxing and watching a Japanese man play with the pigeons. He would flick his hand and they would fly right up and land in his hand. He was like a Japanese version of the pigeon lady from Home Alone 2. After taking a rest for a while we resumed our journey to a historic shopping district, before catching the train home.
It was a really cool weekend I guess, I really just want to do some traveling outside of this region. I haven’t spent a night outside of my apartment since Golden Week, which was over a month ago. I hope to get my act together soon and have some more interesting stories to tell you. I hope everyone has a good week. I should. We have “no lesson week” this week, so it is fairly relaxing. Just taking care of some planning, meeting with some parents and students. I have a few private lessons as well but nothing too serious. I am looking forward to having the time to get ahead of the 8-ball.
Anyway. Thanks for reading everyone! I will have something else for you soon. I hope everyone is having a nice summer.