Gunma: Ikaho

This weekend was the Ikaho Matsuri!!! Ikaho Matsuri is one of the last "summer" matsuri held in Gunma. It is three days long (Thursday through Saturday) with most of the kids and adults participating in carrying omikoshi (floats) up the town's ishi-dan (stone stairs) from the bottom all the way up to the top (300 some odd steps in total) ending at the Ikaho Shrine.










All my students went through the rain to carry up their omikoshi (floats) up the ishidan to the temple at the top.

It was craaazy!!!!

Tokyo

This weekend I went to Numata (the city north of Shibukawa) and hung out with some JETs. This was the first time I experienced an earthquake. We were sitting in the izakaya (bar restaurant) and all of a sudden the floor started to shake. I acutally thought I may have had too much to drink and was losing my sense of balance, but the Japanese people we were hanging out with reassured us that it was indeed our first Japanese "jishin". The night was fun. I'd say the highlight was the gyoza stuffed chicken wings (think a gyoza aka potsticker, and instead of that dough outside, there is a chicken wing surrounding that wonderful garlic pork mixture). I stayed over at a friend's house in Gokan (i think) and woke up early Saturday morning to head out to Tokyo.

It had been over a year since I saw my friend Keimo. He and I decided to head to Odaiba and see the FUJI TV summer festival. There was a lot going on and they had a stamp scavenger hunt. So he and I spent the day exploring the studio and collecting the stamps. We were able to see a mock setup of the drama Galileo, visit the Mecha Ike beach, and even see some Beijing Olympic memorabilia. At the end, our prize was some seeds for some kind of plant (obviously they are lost somewhere in my room by now).
Odaiba is beautiful at night. There is a small scale version of the Statue of Liberty right next to the Kua Aina on the outer edge of Aqua City mall. Across the water is Rainbow bridge. It was really nice, but I had to hop on the train and head home before we knew it!

Tochigi

So, we were planning on going to Nikko this past weekend because we couldn't get a bus out to Kyoto (*cries*). And then destiny helped out! My favorite J-Pop group, Arashi's TV show (Himitsu no Arashi-chan) took the Arashi Guys to Nikko!!!!
I learned a lot of stuff about Nikko right before I left, so I decided to make my Nikko adventure an Arashi-inspired one!!!

First thing I did when I got there was eat Yuba no nimono(its really flat tofu sheets rolled together and boiled in a shoyu-based soup). It was really silky and yummy!

Yuba

Then I later decided to eat at Nikko Miyamae Dango... Just like the Arashi guys did!!!

They use rice instead of the usual mochiko (rice powder) which makes the dango sweeter and softer because it's rice, it's not so chewy and absorbs the flavor of the miso and brown sugar better. It was awesome! But the wait was craaazy. I guess a lot of girls watched HnA on Friday, cuz there was a 20 min. long line there when I went, and later in the day, the line was even longer! But it was good, and I met the old lady who owns the shop. She's cute. Poor thing works so hard. She told me that the crazy lines were a new thing for them.

The next thing I had to do was go to the World Heritage area. I have been to a fair share of temples, shrines, and other historical sites. But Nikko is seriously so beautiful and the temples are waay over the top. I decided to save Toshogu for the second day of my trip because of all of the details. I got to see the sacred horse and the Monkey "circle of life" that adorns his stable. It was pretty awesome to see it in person.


The Famous Hear, Speak, See No Evil spot

The sacred white horse

Then, I made an effort to figure out where the power spot was. It took me a little while, but there is a guy that is sitting selling cameras, and I was like, "Is this the power spot?" and he told me it was. I took a picture of it... Then, I am a little too tall for 160cm (i'm like 165) so I had to squat just a little bit to see the Higurashi Mon framed by the tori, but I did see it. And it was pretty cool. Thanks HnA for the info!

View from the "Power Spot"

Toshogu

I also went up the Irohazaka on the bus to get to Kegon Falls. Irohazaka is the famous road in Nikko that takes a total of 48 crazy hairpin turns to get up and down the mountain that is home to the Nikko National Park. Iroha is the old way of saying the Japanese alphabet (character system) and using all 48, a poem was created.

i ro ha ni ho he to
chi ri nu ru wo
wa ka yo ta re so
tsu ne na ra mu
u wi no o ku ya ma
ke fu ko e te
a sa ki yu me mi shi
we hi mo se su

Aaaaaanyways, this was crazy, especially on the ride down. The bus was sooo crowded that I had to sit in the very front pull down seat (it gets pulled down in the aisle from the arm rest of the seat to the right or left of the aisle) and I swear if there was an abrupt stop, I would have flown straight out of that seat out the window and over the cliff.

Ok, so the reason I went up there, the waterfall. It was pretty awesome. 97 meters of beauty. I've seen a lot of waterfalls in my lifetime, but I think this was the first time I was able to walk down to the foot of one and be able to feel the cool mist and see the massive size it really has. Also, the walls surrounding the main falls were "weeping" as well, so it was quite spectacular.

The Last part of my Nikko Adventure was the Masuzushi (Salmon on sushi rice) And the bonus! There was a park between the Nikko Park Lodge and the sites that had a huuuuuuuge roller-slide! Sooooo much fun, but my pants were soaked!!!

Kanagawa, Yamanashi, Shizuoka

This weekend was my first trip to Kanagawa.... weird.For most people who have visited Japan, this is a must see place. It is the prefecture where you can find both Kamakura (one of the old capitals of Japan) and Yokohama (has a nice bayside area as well as the biggest China Town in Japan). However, this was my first time, in my third time in the country and almost two months into living here. But I didn't go to Kamakura or Yokohama (saving those for a nice day). I went to Oiso to spend the night at my friend Yu's house before our epic road trip to Fuji Q Highland Park.
We got up early and headed out in our pink rental car.

It took about three hours to get to Fuji Q... Upon arrival we saw massive coaster tracks, and got very excited!

Upon entering (using my SDSU school ID for the Student discount! I'm Chinese, can't help it) we were directed over to these photo booths. We inserted our tickets, and then the machine counted down. In less than five seconds out popped these cool fancy tickets.

Apparently Derek didnt realize what was going on, so his shoulder was the star. This pass gave us free reign over the park rides. If you rather not pay the $30, you can pay for individual rides, but the best ride, Ee Ja Nai Ka, costs $10 a ride.
Ee Ja Nai Ka is a 4-D ride. As far as I know, it is the second ever built (the first being X at Magic Mountain, which has recently been upgraded to X2). I looooooved X2 when I went to Magic Mountain, so I couldn't wait to get on Ee Ja Nai Ka. It was a good ride, but X2 had flames and all that jazz, so it was a bit disappointing. We ended up going on this one twice (or was it three times?). Fuji Q is not run in a very smart way. For a rainy cloudy day, it was pretty busy. Usually parks realize how busy it is and throw in another car or two to make the lines go faster, but NOT Fuji Q. They had one, sometimes two, cars going for their coasters. This made our wait for a 30 second ride, dodonpa (think superman but a complete cycle), over two and half hours long. THEEEEEN, to put some icing on that cake, once we got into the building, they shut the ride down because of the rain. Luckily as we exited, they handed us return tickets so we didnt have to wait for five bazillion hours. Overall, it was fun. Always good to go to theme parks with a group of people so the wait time isnt as excruciating. That night we stayed at some ritzy hotel near one of the lakes surrounding Mt. Fuji. It was pretty cloudy, so we couldnt see the mountain, but the hotel was nice and we all had a good night's rest. On Sunday we went to Gotemba Premium Outlets in Shizuoka. The outlet was pretty big and so were the prices. Basically, things were being sold at regular price in America. It was fun to look around, but I had to get back to Tokyo to catch my train (I think all of my journals are going to end like this).

Tokyo & Chiba

This weekend's adventure took me to Kagurazaka, Shiodome, Shibuya, Ginza, and Narita.

The day started off pretty well, nice sunny weather, meeting my friends (Rina and Ami) at Ueno park.

Kagurazaka is an area of Shinjuku known for its French inflence as well as its remenant buildings and restaurants from Japan's past. I mainly wanted to go there because it was in a drama that I watched, Haikei, Chichi-ue Sama (Dear Dad), but it ended up being a really fun exploration. We tried to go to the Canal Cafe, but because of the crazy random rain that hit, all the seats were wet.

After that we headed over to Shiodome to catch the last week of the Summer Festival for NiTele (Nippon TV). It was the day before their annual 24 Hour TV Charity special, so there was a lot to see and do (although Fuji was much better).

After that we went to Starbucks and frantically looked for some Mont Blanc Cakes in the area. Unfortunately we couldnt get them (all sold out) so we ventured out to Higashi Ginza to pick some up from Angelina (they make the best mont blanc Ive ever had).

We all parted and I went to Shibuya to meet up with Khwb(little angry man), my friend from SD. It was his first time in Tokyo so I knew we had a lot of options, but he opted to get some McDs. hahah. It was really fun getting to see him again (it had been a few months) and then I crashed at his place that night in Narita city. It was good times. The next day I went to Shibuya to shop around before hopping on the Shonan-Shinjuku back to the Gun.

Nagano, Gifu, Toyama

So.... it has been one crazy and random weekend!!!
But I am officially a quarter of the way through getting to see all of the prefectures!!!!!
First, let me introduce you to Yuuma-chan. He is the mascot of Gunma, and will be traveling with me all over the country from now on.

Saturday was the Maebashi Hanabi Taikai (Fireworks Gathering), and there were like 3000 fireworks to be set off over a two hour period in the center of Maebashi. All of the new JETs were going to reunite for the first time to watch them, but I had to go meet up with Keith (papa) at Shibukawa station at 8:37 because the last bus to Ikaho leaves the station at 8:58... which totally sux, but that's what happens when you live in the inaka.
Anyways, we were shooting the shit, catching up with each other and then Keith was telling me how much he wanted to go to Matsumoto-jyo (Matsumoto Castle). And I am all about going to castles. Plus, this is my first chance to challenge my Everest and go to a few prefectures. We were also planing to go to this village called Shirakawa-go, but it ended up that we couldnt make it. I'll get to the reason later.
So, on Sunday morning we start out going to Nagano city to go to 善光寺 (Zenkoji) which is a temple that was founded before buddhism in Japan was split into the different schools, built in the 7th century. It was a pretty cool site, but it had been vandalized in April (i believe) of this year when they decided to pull out of the torch ceremony for the olympics.

After Zenkoji, we traveled west (i think) to Matsumoto city. This is one of the top three castles to visit in Japan, the others being Himeiji and Kumamoto. It is famous for its black exterior and roof shape. It has all kinds of different names, but Matsumoto castle is the easiest for me to remember.
After Matsumoto, we took a Highway bus through the Japanese Alps to Takayama in Gifu. The reason we were going here was to go to Shirakawa-go, which is one of the last traditional villages in Japan, and was the most recent addition to the World Heritage list. So we got there at about 8pm, and luckily Krystel lives there. So Krys met us at the station and we walked over to her part of the city. We ate at Gusto, which was amazing, because of the drink bar, and then went back to her place. There we had a celebratory beer, me for passing my quarter mark of prefectures visited, and Keith for passing his half way mark. Then we tried to plan our trip for the next day, kampai'd and talked till the wee hours of the morning.
The next day we got up and went to the station to get on the bus to Shirakawa-go, but we realized that their buses were kind of far and few inbetween, so we couldnt go and make it back to Ikaho by night. So we decided to go to Toyama and Niigata instead. This way, we were on our way back to Gunma and visiting places we've never been to.
Toyama was pretty nice, we stopped in this place called Inotani, which is on the outskirts of Toyama city before we got to the city center. We were there for about an hour, and it was a really pretty place in the mountains with a river running through it and a nice red bridge. The town was pretty tiny, and there weren’t that many people around, but it was a good place to relax and explore while waiting for our next train. When we finally got to Toyama, we were starving! Luckily we chose to eat at this REALLY good restaurant. Had Special mixed tempura don, which was like one big tempura of shrimp, ika, and scallops, all which come from the sea of Japan and are famous out of Toyama. I mean, this stuff was sooo delicious I am thinking of going back some day. After we had that awesome lunch, we went to Toyama castle. It was pretty small, and they were doing construction around the area, so we didnt go into the castle because it was just too far, and Toyama was just too hot to be walking around in unshaded area. But we did take pictures of the castle, which we agreed was good enough. The we got on another train and made our way to Naoetsu, Niigata.
In Naoetsu, there isn’t anything you can do if you are only there for an hour since it’s a beach city, and the main attraction is a park that is quite a distance away. So we just stayed in the train station, bought some onigiri, and watched the Olympics. From there we went to Nagoya and caught a shinkansen back to Takasaki, then the Joetsu line to Shibukawa just in time to hop on the last bus to Ikaho.