things learnt while spring cleaning

I always wondered what this stupid piece of metal did on my stove. I always figured when I moved in, the stove was clean, and everything was the colour it was supposed to be, i.e. The parts that were black were supposed to be black, not blackened from smoke and not being cleaned for months and stuff. Boy, how wrong I was.

where's the beef?

I know, I know. For someone who has what some may say a slight obsession with food, I somehow managed to travel 3 hours by train to Kobe for the weekend, and not eat the famed Kobe beef once. After just buying a car this month that cost more than I expected (i.e. more than the amount in my Japanese bank account) I was a little weary of spending $80 on a single meal, when they say the lesser-known Hida Beef in my prefecture is about the same, if not better, and also since this whole month I'm trying to survive on just $5 a meal until my next pay cheque arrives.

But still, as it inevitably happens, the highlight of my trip this weekend away, was the side-trip to another city outside the city I was visiting. Kobe was good, but the most touristy thing we saw were the ijinkan, or "barbarian houses", built by the small foreign population in around the 1900s. I can see how they would be a popular tourist spot for Japanese tourists, but it was really hard to convince ourselves to pay $10 just to see what an old English house looked like.

But our side trip took our crew to Himeiji, a lesser known city known for having one of the top three castles in Japan. Our trip coincided with cherry blossom season, which made for an excessive amount of pictures involving the castle, cherry blossoms, or both.

Unfortunately, it seems that all of Japan kinda knew about the picturesqueness of Himeiji and the spring time, and conspired against us to make sure it was ridiculously packed when we got there. Which mean facing the crowds while walking through the maze-like grounds of Himeiji castle, and spending what seemed like an hour of lining up and waiting just to reach the top of Himeiji castle (there are like 5 floors). We kinda gave up on the 3rd floor, when we noticed we weren't even looking at any artifiacts, and heading straight to the line just to keep going up.

Still, despite the lack of Kobe beef consumption and the crazy packedness that was Himeiji castle, it still was a pretty cool weekend. We decided to stay at a capsule hotel (again), which actually turned out to be way better than our previous experience - I think we just happened to luck out and find a luxury capsule hotel, as opposed to your standard, run-of-the-mill capsule hotel that's usually meant for people who have missed their last train. It still wasn't roomier than the other one, but I the word "dank" didn't really come to mind this time. It was like, clean, and fancy, with its attached onsen and like 4 or 5 different types of baths to try out - my highlight was the green tea bath.

Also, in lieu of our expensive Kobe dinner, we went to an all-you-can eat/drink place instead. We were kinda expecting like a buffet type thing, but turned out to be way cooler.

Plus, at the all you can eat place, I they also had heaps of cool steaky foods on the menu. So, technically, I did eat beef in Kobe... so does that count?

i walked 18 kilometres and all i got was this lousy, business card-sized certificate.

That's right.


I figured I had to finish at least one seemingly unnecessary school walk. The last one I did was when I was an exchange student in Sapporo, and that 33km walk ended once I found out that anyone who wanted to give up would have a taxi called for them and be taken to chill and relax while the other suckers continued walking in the summer heat.

And while I did enjoy relaxing at the end while my ill-informed friends battled through the 30 degree heat, I always wished I made it through the end to get my own certificate.

That being said, I also did expect the certificate to be bigger than a business card. And would have my name at least written on it before it was given to me and stuff...

k-fighters 7

I sometimes have really weird conversations with my students. Sometimes, it's because their English isn't that good, so they don't know how to say what they want to say. Or, they don't understand my questions, so answer with something totally random, like answering "yes" to a "What did you do yesterday?". So I'm kinda used to having really stilted conversations and going along with a conversation as if everything's fine, even though it's not making much sense.

On the other hand, sometimes, I just get a feeling that some of my kids are freaks. Like a conversation I had last week with a 2nd year Junior high school (Year 8) boy.

Me: Hey! How are you?
K-fighter: I'm a stranger here. K fighters 7!
Me: um... okay.
K-fighter: Do you K fighters 7?
Me: No. Do you?
K-fighter: Yes. Why don't you try?
Me: Um... okay...
K fighter giggles and runs off.

oh japan!

When we're completely stumped by something that seems absurd, über-practical, or something not found in any other country, there's nothing much we can really do but just collectively sigh and think, "Oh Japan!"

This is one of those moments.

japan in one word

I was trying to find a Japanese word that best encapsulates my time in Japan. One that's slightly pretentious, in that it can't be directly translated to a single word in English, and a word that is closely associated with good times, and a sense of contentment or satisfaction.

That word is houdai (放題).

It pretty much means "all you can", as in "all you can eat", "all you can drink". Last week, we did 3 hours of all you can play at Sega World, which was pretty cool, and I'm hoping to go to an all you can eat crab restaurant once I save up some money, or find a really good one to go to. I've certainly experienced my fair share of all you can drink thanks to our frequent visits to our regular Karaoke place (yes, I have a regular karaoke place, I realise that's a little sad) but this weekend I got to experience "all you can pick", which has to be one of my top 5 "all you can" things to do in Japan.

Me and my friends went on a bus tour to neighbouring Aichi prefecture on Saturday. We didn't read the itinerary completely, so we overlooked the fact that the tour would involve a visit to a shrine that took up almost a whole island, and that there'd be a visit to a Miso factory (which would have been a highlight for me had there been a huge Miso sign that would open up endless possibilties of puns, but I digress). We signed up for the all you can pick strawberries at the strawberry farm.


Armed with our plastic picking container with a compartment of condensed milk, we made our way through row upon row of strawberry plants in the greenhouse, and picked strawberries till our hands became bloody (or soaked red with strawberry juice, who's to know?) While the amateur Japanese tourists took their time in picking the most perfect strawberries and savouring the sweet, ambrosia-like flavour of the freshest strawberries imaginable, we wolfed down as many as we could in 45 minutes.

The result: Jess - 40something, Narin, 82, and Julie 101.

kagaya

I so have to go to this bar next time in Tokyo. It's called Kagaya, and it involves a weird dude dressing up in costumes serving drinks, and introducing the drinks menu with a puppet show. I figure there's not much point trying to explain it in detail, since I only read about it here, but the youtube videos look so random that I have to go there next time.

urgh. i did it again.

I went snowboarding again, and being a little more realistic this time, decided to take my camera instead of my iPod on the slopes, seeing how my dreams of being a born snowboarder were kinda dashed by my inability to get off the chair lift last time without ducking and covering.

Unfortunately, in all the excitement of trying to find snowboarding shoes that fit properly (I didn't by the way, stupid small Japanese shoes!), I put all my stuff in a coin locker. Including my camera. So, again, a lack of pictures to prove to anyone at home that I actually did some voluntarily physical exertion. So all I have now to show of it is this picture of the mountain we went to, and my ridiculously sore muscles. I still can't believe that getting up from falling down a lot can still count as actual exercise.



Well, if falling down counts as exercise, then playing the Taiko drum game must totally count as exercise as well, which if it does, means I exercised on Friday and Sunday too! Seriously, it's totally exhausting whacking huge-arse Japanese drums to the beat of the Rocky theme and Super Mario Bros.

But Sunday we visited Sega World, which if they had when I was a kid in Australia, would have made the best party place ever - like made the obligatory party at McDonald's look extremely lame. There's like pool tables, table tennis bowling, mini bowling, air hockey, darts, and BB gun shooting target ranges, karaoke rooms, PS2s, arcade games (all on free play, mind you) in addition to like a tennis game where you have to return balls and hit all the targets, a basketball game, a baseball batting range, mini tennis and volleyball courts, and even massage chairs and a exercise horse-riding machine. You know, cos if cheap karaoke, pool, sport and video games weren't enough to entice you, sitting on a toned-down mechanical bull for 15 minutes is like icing on the cake!

i'm lovin' it

I think if I hadn't seen Supersize Me, and Starbucks wasn't in our local shopping centre, I would probably live in our Macca's. Why? Well, anyone who knows me, knows how excited I get about trying new foods and new specials, so on top of the whole "yay it's some novel Japanese McDonald's" thing, they have new specials every single month. It reminds me of when Macca's used to have "Flavour of the Month" when I was in primary school, and it was tradition to go get Macca's every Tuesday after tennis practice. And yes, I was a little heavier back then.

Anyway, at the moment the specials are all chocolate involved:





(By the way, the chocolate sundae actually counts as a special here because normally they've only got mango or strawberry sundaes)

So yeah, I was a little vocal about expressing my excitement about new specials, but what really made me want to visit Macca's more was the reaction of the store people to seeing three foreigners entering a Macca's in the middle of nowhere. Like, the shopping centre was built where rice paddies used to be, middle of nowhere. Anyways, I loved how despite not understanding every single word of what they were saying, I totally got what they were talking about.

Clerk 1: Uh oh.
Clerk 2: Are you going to be okay, or do you want me to help you serve them?
Clerk 1: Um.... I've got it, I should be fine. There's an English menu somewhere, right?
Clerk 2: Uh, maybe, check the back side of the menu.

As we approach the counter after discussing loudly what we want to eat, the clerks smile at us, forgoing the usual Irasshaimase, thinking that we'll have no idea what they're talking about in Japanese. That is, until my Japanese-fluent friend (Like, ordering food on the phone and having the other person have no idea that she's not Japanese) starts ordering and asking them questions about today's menu, and the store people burst out laughing.

Clerk 1: Oh Thank God! I was so nervous! Your Japanese is so good!
Friend: Oh, I'm not that good yet, I just know how to order McDonald's in Japanese.
Clerk 1: Well, that's good enough for us!

If I wasn't so loyal to our friends at Starbucks (i.e. Smiley girl, guy who works at multiple Starbucks, The Newbies, and Glen) I so would start hanging out at Macca's more.

peace parks, omiyage and forts

I think I've just had two weekends in a row which pretty much represent the kinds of weekends I have here in Japan.

Two weeks ago, which was a long weekend here in Japan, me and a couple of other JETs went to Hiroshima - it felt like it had been ages since we had done some hardcore travelling outside our prefecture, so we were all excited - to top the whole experience off, we found our favourite hotel chain - Super Hotel had a hotel in Hiroshima as well, and best of all, it only opened just the week before we arrived! Yay Brand new hotels!


I should take this moment while you're probably scratching your head to explain our obsession with what seems like a regular hotel chain. After spending a fair number of nights in Japanese style cheap-ass accomodation, which has a shared bathroom for everyone, shared showers, and a room literally the size of a single bed (I could actually touch all four walls with my head, toes, and hands), Super Hotel is like a Godesend - for what works out to be around $35 per person per night (if there's 3 or 4 of you) you can get a double sized bed, bunk bed, and an extra single bed with your own bathroom and free all you can eat breakfast, all for the same price as a claustrophobic bathroomless room in Tokyo. So that's why the thought of a cheap hotel caused everyone to strike weird, random poses in front of it.

So Hiroshima, was really awesome, and really intense - On Saturday, we went to the Peace Museum with a couple hours before closing time to go, thinking that 2 hours were enough to see everything. After the 30 minutes before closing chime went, I got to the end of the first building, which had explained the history of Hiroshima before the bomb, and the history of bombs in the world.

I was a little disappointed when I hit the gift shop that It only focused on the history of the bomb rather than what happened in the blasts, until I actually got to the Main Building, which confronts you straight away with photos of the bomb blast, and a section with mannequins depicting what people would have looked like right after the bomb blast - with the charred skin hanging of people's arms and little kids crying and everything. Like, seriously, intense. It has bits of clothing, skin and hair of people and heaps of personal accounts about the bomb. We ended up revisiting the museum the day before we left so we could take our time in the Main building and see everything we wanted too, and then took another couple of hours to recover from seeing all that stuff.

But the weekend again concluded how it normally does with our trips - Firstly, our need to conform to Japanese traditions as much as we can, as well as our need to be liked by our other teachers means we spend around $35 on souvenirs/food to give to our teachers when we get back. It's something that we always buy, but always forget to factor into our budgets. Then, after buying our omiyage, we make our way back to Gifu, always thinking we've planned enough time to get back, but still finding ourselves arrive at home sometime in the evening, buggered, tired, and not wanting to travel for a while.

And so, it leads us to the other side of the weekend spectrum, such as this weekend. It involves a near-daily visit to Starbucks - not because we're obsessed (because seriously, we're not, we just happen to be at Starbucks on the days they change their seasonal menu) but mainly because there's not much else to do around here, other than buy other unnecessary stuff in the shopping centre. That is, other than building a fort.

It's not a fort per se, mainly, just a sheet that's draped down over the door frame, so that the sliding door can stay open for us to watch TV, but at the same time, minimising the amount of heat that escapes my poorly-insulated bedroom. Seeing how it's probably only 9 or 10 degrees in my house at the moment, I'm sure you can understand how extreme circumstances call for extreme fort-building.

Just for the record, we're not complete losers - fort-building only takes up so much of the weekend, the rest of it's filled with eating crap, thinking about coffee, and if we're really feeling ambituous, making scones and practising our British accents.

umm... mmm?

You know what this is?

It's fugu, which any old-school Simpsons fan will tell you is blowfish, the same kind that is poisonous if not prepared correctly, and forces a poorly-animated Homer to do everything he wants to do in life in what he believes to be the last 24 hours of his life.

While I have a penchant for trying many weird foods, I would've thought I'd need to psych myself up for my first fugu experience. I was expected of making it a huge event eating fugu, planning it for weeks to find the perfect restaurant that specialises in fugu and spending an exorbitant amount on trying this weird food.

But I didn't expect it to be served in a set course meal I was having with my dad in Tokyo. It was kinda anti-climactic actually, considering it was just plonked right in front of us and told it was fugu. But hey, I shouldn't really complain considering I got to try fugu!

So was it everything I ever dreamed of and more? Well, it was kinda meh, actually. The fish was cut really thinly, and doesn't have much of a flavour or unique texture to it. Plus, it's served with citrusy-yuzu soy sauce that you're supposed to dip it in, which pretty much is the only thing you tasted when you eat it.

And, I had heard that when fugu's done right, the licensed fugu chefs leave the tiniest trace of venom on the fish you're eating, so it makes your mouth tingle a little bit. Which, if that actually happened to me, would've been cool, but I'm still unsure if it was a placebo effect and I just thought it felt a little tingly. Meh Ah well, at least I've got another food I can say that I've eaten...

wooo! snowboarding! and nothing to show of it!

I had a fairly specific picture in mind when I thought about what my very first snowboarding experience would be like. It involved me, sitting atop a slope, looking down, with my snowboard firmly attached to my feet. As I start going down the slopes, carving like a pro, there'd be music playing in the background - more specifically, N*E*R*D's Rockstar (Jason Nevin's Remix), slowly building up in volume as I gain speed down the slope.

And yes, my perception of snowboarding may have been somewhat influenced by years of playing SSX, but not completely - It's not like I was expecting to do a 540 backside tailgrab over a huge gap or anything, I just has the more realistic expectation of being able to go down a slope with some music in the background. And yes, it may have raised the bar a little too high, considering it was my first time seeing actual snow, let alone first time snowboarding.

So that's why, when I was packing stuff to take to the ski place, I put my iPod in my pocket rather than my trusty digital camera. I was kinda afraid to take too much stuff to the snow in case I lost stuff or broke stuff while tumbing down the slopes in a huge, comically-sized snowball, picking up speed and other unwary snowboarders/skiiers that couldn't move out of the snowball's way. Again, why I took my fancy new iPod instead of my older and less expensive digital camera that can also be easily replaced in Japan, is beyond me.

So, while I wait for my friends to post some photos of me on the slopes onto facebook, I've only got this one photo of me in "action" (I use that term liberally).




*UPDATE*
Thanks to the beauty of facebook (and a friend who was actually smart enough to take a camera), I now have another photo of me snowboarding! that's right! TWO photos!

top or bottom?

Before going to Tokyo, all I thought about Tokyo was of Harajuku girls, the busiest pedestrian crossing in the world, and people being crammed into trains. But now, it's of raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens. Yes, those were a few of my favourite things, which one night at a Capsule hotel has branded in my brain. Stupid Julie Andrews.

So yeah, what else could top off an already Japanese quotient-filled day at DisneySea other than with a stay at a capsule hotel? Well, turns out a lot of stuff, like place with an actual bed, and less snoring people, and stuff. We checked in after buying the "one-night stay" ticket from the vending machine near the front door, and then moving 50 centimetres to the right to give to the man waiting at the desk (I'm still trying to work out why it's not just easier to tell and pay the guy who's standing right there rather than buy the ticket.) After taking our requests for the type of bed we want (top or bottom) , and giving us a key to our lockers (the capsules are too small for bring any bags other than belongings) we're then showed to our floor, which looks like rows upon rows of capsules... It's kinda like a spacious morgue, only in the less morbid kinda way...



So, after taking a shower in the shared Japanese style baths, and putting on my capsule hotel Pjs, there wasn't really much to do in my capsule - I alreadyplayed with the side control a bit but all it does is control the TV and have a built in alarm clock... So, what else could I do but watch TV?


So apparently, The Sound of Music in Japan, is still the sound of music - just with Japanese subtitles - I was kinda hoping to hear the Japanese version of Do-Re-Mi. And, they even leave in the original intermission section of the movie that would've only been shown in cinemas. And the songs are still kinda corny and hard to get out of your head.

mmm...

Meh. I could blog about what I got up to during my 8 day trip to Tokyo and stuff, like about Disneysea, and my capsule hotel experience and stuff, but I just got back today, and decided that would require more effort than can be bothered doing at the moment. So, instead, I thought I'd just post photos of more food I've eaten...


Winter Koalas: Roast Almond Latte Flavoured



Random Bento on a Bullet train - including the fake wooden box made of polystyrene.

Passionfruit flavoured Coffee.


Black Peppercorn KFC... I swear it tastes better here than in Australia.


A Harajuku-crepe! While I'm still on the search for my own Harajuku girl possé like Gwen Stefani, I may just settle for my own Harajuku crepe-dispensing girl instead.


Homard Lobster and Blue Crab Bisque



Scrambled Tofu on Rice



Strawberry KitKats, complete with Japanese-style unnecessary layers of packaging

Oden (Fish cakes stewed for a few hours in a seaweed-based broth) in a can in a vending machine...


Mango Frozen Yoghurt with Aloe Vera pieces



Iron Chef Chinese's Restaurant in Yokoyama



Nikuman/ Meat Bun in Yokohama's famous Chinatown District



Fancy Hamburger in Tokyo


Flower Sushi Bento

happy merry christmas!

Happy Merry Christmas and a happy new year! I'm in Tokyo at the moment
since I decided I wanted to feel somewhat productive with using my
time off work. I've got two weeks off from school but decided to only
spend a week in Tokyo since we planned on making an attempt to have a
semi-traditional Christmas dinner in Gifu. Didn't really feel like
Christmas though since I was supposed to work that day, all the stores
were open, and they had already taken their Christmas decorations down
in preparation for New Year's.

Anyway, me and a friend left for Tokyo on the 27th, and are planning
to stay till the 5th. So far we've been to Nikko and seen the three
wise monkeys (see, hear and speak no evil monkeys) and in Tokyo,
visited Sega's indoor theme park Joypolis and got on the
mildly-whelming (not over or underwhelming, just whelming) Prison
Break ride. I guess i may have appreciated it more had I actually seen
the show, and understood everything that was said as well. Ah well.

Unfortunately, this trip required a necessary visit to the Apple Store
in Ginza. I only enjoy visiting there when I don't need to go, not
when I have to buy a charger for my iPod after forgetting to pack it
for this trip. I actually managed to forget everything at home that I
bought specifically for this trip. Urgh.

yatta! christmas!

It was pretty stressful, and at one point, I thought it was going to be a complete disaster, but it turned out all right in the end. Kinda like what you'd expect from your standard clichéd chick flick, I guess. Minus the passionate embrace and the couple you know are gonna get together in the end.

But I digress (again) - My first Christmas party without family went alright without too many dramas! Woo! I didn't realise how much I take family (i.e. mum) for granted considering there's so much planning to do to make such a huge meal. Granted, I kinda did Christmas dinner in Australia before, but that involved an oven, and hot weather that defrosted everything, and the involvement of less flammable ingredients....

So, considering the size of my fridge and my oven/microwave/toaster combo appliance, it took heaps of micro-organising - we ordered the ham and cheesecake and chicken online from Nagoya, and it just managed to fit into our fridge. Then, since my "oven" is kinda small, we weren't too sure how long to cook stuff, so we played it safe and decided to buy a pre-cooked ham that just required defrosting. Which would have been good, had we taken the ham out to defrost long enough. Lesson learned - hams take longer than 2 days to defrost. And by baking it in an "oven" for around about 2 hours and letting it rest for a couple hours before eating it should make it less icy.

2nd lesson learnt - probably not best to try and toast almonds in an industrial-strength fish grill. Toast burns if you leave it in the grill for longer than a minute, and almonds after a few results in a fairly huge flame. At least I know now that you can put water on gas-based fires.



So yeah, after all the food-related dramas, it turned out to be a pretty good meal, and to top it all off, we decided on doing some carolling while fulfilling our Japanese quotient of the day.



Turns out, carolling is WAY more fun when it's done in a room with just you friends, a few drinks, and some Nelly, Justin Timberlake and Sean Kingston... and of course, the obligatory Rihanna song.

how to make delicious tea in a flash

oshiri kajiri mushi...

So, it's been two full weekends since my last blog, and What do I have to show for it?

• A scarf, and two pairs of gloves - I realised after riding my bike to school one wet, sub 5˚ morning that I really needed to buy more winter weather accessories. And, never seeing the snow much in Melbourne, decided I needed to make my first ever purchase of a scarf. The only one I had beforehand was a Footscray Bulldogs scarf, which was rarely used because:
  a) It's never really scarf-worthy weather in Melbourne,
  b) Surprisingly, I never really felt an urge to show everyone which AFL team I barracked for, or even let people know that I actually, at one point in time, did follow the AFL, albeit superficially and purely because I liked dogs and the colours red and blue when I actually did follow the AFL, and
  c) I'm not a bogan.
  I also ended up with two pairs of gloves - not because I felt the need to have options to coordinate with what I wore each day, but since I didn't expect to find any gloves I liked and bought a cheap arse pair that I thought I were okay. That was, until I found a cooler, more expensive pair of leather gloves in another store 10 minutes later.
  
• A Paper Doll - "Meh, I've done origami before, a paper doll can't be that hard!"
  One deflated ego, and two hours later, resulted in this: Turns out paper doll, not as origamiy as I thought. And, I found out that I have issues differentiating an inch from a centimetre, which doesn't make the art of making paper dolls any easier.
• A Japanese song stuck in my head. After Karaoke last week (yes, I went again, and please don't judge me - I got tricked into doing all these things! stupid Japan!) Our usual trip was a little different this time since we went with a Japanese guy who didn't speak that much English. Not wanting him to feel out of the loop, I tried to sing a Japanese song, and turns out, I don't know that many. The only ones I do know happen to be both kid's songs - one from 2000, and the other one, a huge hit at the moment... So much so that it's now even got it's own dance. You know how when you don't know all the words to a song, only the few words you know play through your head, which eventually drives you insane? Well, it seems to happen a lot in Japan, since I can't understand most of the words, and this song just feels like I should know more to the song, but what I know is pretty much it.... "Oshiri kajiri mushi...." dammit!
  
• A butt groove on my kotatsu chair. Due to a lack of central heating in Japan and my paranoia about using a kerosene heater, my saviour is my trusty ol' kotatsu. It's like a coffee table, with a blanket underneath the top table bit that drapes over the edges and underneath the table top and blanket is a mini heater, so as you sit underneath the table, your feet stay warm, and the heat stays in thanks to the blankets. Mmm.... toasty... I so am not looking forward to my next electricity bill.
  
• Resentment towards TV networks. If it weren't for the Writer's Strikes, I wouldn't have sat through a season-long Heroes marathon. It only would have been an 10 episode marathan of Heroes instead. Now not only am I more yay-Heroes, but I'm annoyed that this next episode that's only meant to tie up the current storyline is now serving as the season finale. Booo.
  

subarashii unda za shii...

Don't even get me started on what I think about having school on Sundays. I don't care that I get Monday off in lieu, and that the day was a bludgy day consisting of a huge sing-off involving all the classes at school, and a marching band, which means I didn't have to teach at all today, but making Sunday a work day when you're used to a standard working week is just sacrilegious.

The only thing that made my day was watching marching band dancers perform. Not because they were awesome, because they weren't the best dancers in the world, and I'm not sure how I felt about their interpretive dance trying to narrate the story of superman. But, they did perform a flag dance to Disney's Under the Sea. The reason I was excited was that it wasn't just any version of Under the Sea, it was the Japanese version! So it made me overlook their oddly inappropriate dance moves to the song.

weekend away for free! free! free weekend! did i mention it was free?

Guess what I did last weekend? What? free Weekend? How did you know?

Well, since you were so insistent on me telling you what happened, I guess I'll fill you in on my pretty awesome weekend away in Hida. A while back, some random dropped by Kiri's school and was offering weekend trips away to Hida, the northern part of Gifu, organised by Hida city's Department of Tourism. It included a whole schedule of things to do the whole weekend, meals, accommodation, and the bus to transport us there and back. All for free! The catch? Apparently none, except for giving them permission to use photos taken on the tour as well as filling out a questionnaire at the end of the trip.

It seemed a little too good to be true, and I was paranoid about there being some hidden tourist tax or something upon entering the place, but nothing at all. We were warned that people in the area weren't accustomed to many foreign tourists and to watch out for that, but that simply meant everyone didn't speak English but seemed super nice about it.

Highlights of the weekend:

• Picking apples at the apple orchard. Sounds lame, I know, but it also involved all-you-can-eat apples and taking some home, which was pretty cool. I know it sounds like my definition of cool has probably deteriorated, but free fruit seems cool in a country that sells apples for around about $3 each. So it was probably that that made it seem cool, plus it was the first thing we did once we arrived in Hida, so I think we were just pumped to be doing anything for free. We also found out that it was just a week out of apple picking season, so all the apples had already been picked, but the apple people specifically left some trees with apples so that we could pick them over the weekend.
• Walking around the area was kinda cool because it counted as a type of physical exertion (ergo, and adequate amount of exercise) while still seeming touristy and non-exercisey. And, I was wondering why Japanese people make a huge fuss about the changing of the seasons, so I'm kinda seeing why they feel that way after seeing how picturesque everything is when the leaves change colour.
  
  
• Rail Mountain Biking. Yep, you heard right. the area just got rid of their train, and wanting to encourage tourism and do something with the remaining train tracks, they made rail bikes, that run on the tracks, hoping tourists come of the gimmick and to see the sites. It was pretty much just riding a bike, but you don't really choose where you want to go, but I think it seemed fun because we were some of the first people to try it out.
• Making soba noodles from scratch was awesome. I originally went in thinking that it could be something I do at home, but after seeing how much work goes into it, and the fancypants utensils and stuff they use (they have a specialised soba cutting knife that seems like a guillotine with a handle) I think I'll just buy it in a pack, thank you very much. We ended up taking some packs of soba we made home, but it turns out, I should have learnt how to cook soba properly before trying to eat it at home. yurgh.
• Food! Yes, it's me, so of course my highlight would be the food. It was all traditional Japanese food throughout the whole weekend, which seemed a bit much, we got to try the specialities of the region. Although, I think every region of Japan has a speciality, so I'm wondering if heaps of places share specialities with other regions and they just pretend that they don't know about any other region making, say, chicken on sticks. But dinner involved Hida beef, which is pretty much the same as Kobe beef, except it's not from Kobe. So the cattle are played music, to relax them, given beer so they eat more and get fat, and given massages to mix the meat with the fatty tissue. It's also pretty expensive, which is why I was surprised we got to eat it - I was expecting free food meant just some Japanese takeaway, not some lavish feast with free beer and sake.

So all in all, cool weekend - but the whole time, I was just thinking how amazing it was all for free, so I'm not too sure how much I'd pay for the weekend if I were to do it normally. Like, the rail mountain bike was fun, but if I was paying money to experience the feeling of riding my bike and the tunnel, I think I'd have to think it through. But did I mention it was free?