Yamanashi

At the start of March we were invited for a trip out by our friends Ritsuko and Dave, Ben was busy on the day so only I went and I am glad I did.

We went to Yamanashi prefecture which has lots of mountains and is famous for its beautiful nature. It took us about one hour and a half from Tokyo to get there. As soon as arrived I was surprised by the amount of “nature” being stuck in Tokyo and all :P.

We started with lunch which was “Hōtō” , which is “is a popular regional dish originating from Yamanashi, Japan made by stewing flat udon noodles and vegetables in miso soup.”(Thanks Wikipedia) It was really delicious and just the thing I needed to prepare me for the Hike around Yamanashi.

We thought we would take the “mid-range” hike which was about 6km and took you to most of the best sights, a waterfall and then to the cable car to take you to the top of the mountain.

Walking around was very pleasant thanks to the brilliantly sunny weather, and with it being early spring it wasn’t too hot.

Walking around allowed us to see such great scenery but a picture`s worth 1000 words so here is a whole lotta words:

See all of theese and more in full size on my photos page (click here)

Hakuba

Now this seems like it was an age ago (well it was in February) but as a kind of New Year trip we went to Hakuba for skiing and snowboarding. We being Me, Ben, Minami, Sven and Hina Sven`s girlfriend. We left late on a Friday night from Shinjuku, we were traveling on a sleeper bus so this meant a VERY uncomfortable night`s sleep. We all woke with stiff necks to see snow outside the bus which really lifted our spirits. By the time we arrived at Hakuba everyone was ready to get going on the piste but we just had to get our rentals out of the way…

Being the crazy giant that I am (Height 190cm and feet size 14ish,33cm) the Japanese assistant nearly cried when I told him my measurements. It seems that I got the only pair of boots my size in the whole resort; this was nice because they were hardly used so actually quite new. We then got out on the slopes, and wow, the mountain was one of the mountains used in the Nagano Olympics so it had some really nice runs and stunning views (check out the pics).

Our hotel had traditional Japanese rooms, which basically means a big tatami area with futons to sleep on, which was actually really nice. Meal times were communal with everyone eating together in a dining hall, we had traditional Japanese foods which were very delicious.

We had half of Saturday and all of Sunday skiing or boarding so we got some decent slope time in, we returned on Monday where I just slept through the very long bus ride to get back to lovely Oji. All in all it was a great trip, I really enjoyed another opportunity to get out skiing again.

The long awaited update

Just a boring day in Oji.






Stay put for real updates soon.

Who says the Japanese don't get irony?

Take a look if you will at this photo, quite boring maybe, nothing really special here, but lets take a closer look:

















Ok so maybe she is a vegetarian, sadly I cant poor scorn on her for that. Her cover of being a veggie would of been believable.........if we didn't happen to be in MacDonalds and she was tucking in to a big beefy burger!

Just goes to show, as much as there are idiots in England with Japanese on their shirts, there are the same idiots here with English on them. We are not so different after all :)



Note: We are going away skiing this weekend, so there will be no weekend updates, but expect lots of skiing pictures coming up next week.


Peace

Mike

Chinese New Year

We were invited out to see the coming of the (Chinese) New Year in Yokohama by one of our evening students, Yumi, on Thursday. Why Yokohama? well it has a very large China town with a beautiful temple (pictured).

It was a real experience, as we got closer and closer to china town we could hear the music and firecrackers. We turned the corner and saw a gathering of people, in amongst the crowd was a dragon, dancing to the music and going from shop to shop.

The dragon went from shop to shop dancing and eventually jumping up and grabbing a little red packet (which contains money, I think it is some kind of good luck New Year thing). All the while there are people playing drums, clashing cymbals and letting off firecrackers, it was a little overwhelming but an impressive spectacle.

We visited the temple, which was much more.....bright/tacky than Japanese temples, lots of gold and statues, but when all lit up it looked amazing, something that my phone camera couldn't capture (I forgot my camera at home sorry).

For dinner we went to a "tabehodai" or all you can eat restaurant, very nice, we had a wide array of Chinese foods including: the Century Egg
which wasn't nearly as bad as I thought it would be, it was just a very eggy egg.

Well that about wraps it up for the New Year festivities, a good night out

Year of the Mouse, Hokkaido pt 3: Homeward Bound (don't sue me Disney)

Well our time in Hokkaido was drawing to a close, we had just an epic journey ahead of us. By epic I mean EPIC, we left Toya at 1pm and arrived home at 7pm the next day! Why such a long and arduous trip? well money of course!

We flew to Hokkaido from Tokyo which was only Y10,000 (about 50pounds) but due to the New Year timing the flight back would be Y30,000 so we couldn't really afford it, so we decided to use the ferry, how bad could it be?......pretty bad

we paid the minimum fare for the ferry Y7000 and so got the minimum comforts, we slept in a room of 70 other people squashed in like sardines (just without all the brine) with paper thin futon(matress) and a pillow made from a substance harder than Kryptonite. It was a rough old night, but I was so tired I just slept all the way through, waking up feeling like an 80yr old, having to make a groaning noise just to stand.

When we arrived in "Tokyo" , well we thought we would arrive there, we actually found that we were several prefectures away from Tokyo, so this meant a lovely 2hr30min train ride with all our baggage. When we reached home we felt like we had been to Everest and back (well at least those guys had sherpers) but we were all glad that we were back in Tokyo, our lovely, noisy ,polluted home :)


I really enjoyed our trip to Hokkaido to see how the others projects are and the differences but I wouldn't trade it at all, I love living in this city!

Year of the Mouse, Hokkaido pt 2: Return of the blogger

So we returned to beautiful Toya (picture) and it is a lovely place, everyone was really welcoming and gave us food and took us to karaoke, but it was just too quiet. We spent lots of time just at home watching films or playing on the xbox. There was one special moment in Toya though, we met a lovely old man there, with the best beard ever, think of the karate master from Kill Bill, he welcomed us in with a cup of tea and said he had a "few" videos he wanted to show us. Needless to say we fell hook, line and sinker for it, we were in his house for 4 hours watching videos of past volunteers and his travels around the world. It was interesting for th first hour or so, but there is only a certain amount of shoddy camera work that one can stand.

We planned to spend New Years Eve/Day in Sapporo (Hokkaidos main city). I was surprised by how empty it was, turns out that New Years is a very family affair in Japan (much like Christmas) so you wont find many people out and about. We managed to enjoy ourselves though, with the sights of Sapporo



And for the New year "countdown" managed to find a club which was relatively buzzing, had a very good time and stumbled home to our "cubicle" at 6am ish.

I say "Cubicle" because we were staying at a "Manga kisaten" or "Manga cafe" where you rent a bed or soft chair for a very reasonable price, and can play computer games or read Manga (comics) or in our case sleep, they even have showers!

Ok that about rounds up that part of the Hokkaido saga, stay tuned for pt 3: The return!

2008 year of the mouse! (Hokkaido pt 1)

Happy new year everyone!

I hope everyone had a great Christmas and new year, no doubt everyone is now cursing their increased waist sizes and getting back to the boring reality of work.

My Christmas/New year period has been hectic (and expensive) to say the least. We went up to Hokkaido on the 26th to see the other volunteers and to generally have a great time!
we met up with them in Niseko, a popular Hokkaido ski resort, which meant one thing, Skiing and lots of it. This appealed to me as I haven`t skied since I was about 12 or something so it was nice to get back out onto the slopes, and to my surprise I could still ski, just like riding a bike you can never forget how to ski, which is useful seeing as I would be doing another 3 days of it!

I really enjoyed all the skiing we did (well for the rest Ben, Tom and Craig snowboarding) but it really does take it out of you! Luckily we are in Japan, so we had the power of the onsen (hot spring) to soothe our aches and pains, and it does a bloody good job at that as well!

After our Niseko trip we returned with Tom and Craig to Toya, where they are currently living, which is a tiny yet beautiful town which I will mention more about in my next post.

Well that's it for the first half of Hokkaido I will try to post more tomorrow, if I have time.

Much love,
Mike!


P.S a big THANK YOU to everyone who wished me a happy birthday, I had a great day and now am enjoying the aged wisdom that 19 gives :P

EDIT : MAKE SURE TO CHECK MY PHOTOS PAGE TO SEE ALL MY PHOTOS FROM HOKKAIDO AND MORE CLICK HERE