Another Fabulous Weekend Gone By

Well, the title says it all! What a great weekend surrounded by friends!! It's weekends like this that make me say, "I don't want to leave Japan!" But don't worry, most of the people I spent the weekend with are leaving anyway, so I will be too!

Friday night I had a meeting with my Fuji Crew team for the Oxfam Trailwalker. We got together to talk about fund-raising and planned some practice hikes for the next two months. Our next hike will be overnight on Friday, probably from 9 pm - 9 am on Saturday morning unless it takes is less or more time to finish. It will be good to get an overnight hike in as we will be hiking through 1-2 nights in the real event come April. I'm sure many of you saw the email I sent about fundraising for the event, so please help me out as I train hard to finish the challenge! Our meeting was a success and afterwards we all went to dinner at a quaint little place called Safari. The walls are lined with big bookshelves, and everything is wooden. It was a cute atmosphere and I had the best cream cheese, salmon and cheese toasted bagel!

After dinner, three of us roadtripped through downpouring rain to the Izu. Kelly and I stayed with my friend Kari. We had some wine and watched The Cutting Edge in honor of the Olympics. The next morning we slept in and then ventured on our yearly strawberry picking adventure. The picture below is compliments of Kelly. Here we're posing in the huge greenhouse where the strawberries are grown.

Strawberry picking is a bit different in Japan. You don't actually bring any strawberries home, but instead it's all you can eat for 30 minutes. You pay a flat fee (a quite pricey one at that at $20, but it's all about the experience!) and can pick and eat to your heart's desire. They give you sweetened condensed milk to dip them in and it's quite common for the Japanese to count how many they eat. Their numbers put gaijin like us to shame, as I only finished a few over 20 strawberries, which equals out to $1 per strawberry. All in all, it was a fabulous time with lots of laughs!

The entrance to "Cafe Strawberry"

Finding the best ones! Another photo by KellyKilgore

Having some fun! Again, photo courtesy of KellyKilgore

After strawberry picking, we had a nice conversation with the workers. Always celebrities when foreign in Japan! We chatted for awhile and then bought some strawberry beer from them. I haven't drank mine yet, but it sounds quite interesting! I think it's locally brewed from the strawberries at their cafe if I understood right. Will let you know how it is!

Then we were on to our road trip to the best onsen I've been to so far. We drove through the mountains and a little over an hour to Ito, Japan. The ride included lots of music, car dancing and coffee. See below:

Finally, we reached our destination: Akazawa Onsen/Spa. It has indoor and outdoor baths overlooking the Pacific Ocean and a few mountains. It's absolutely amazing and one of the most relaxing places I have ever been! They also had some outdoor baths where you lay back and there are jets massaging your whole body. So great! The picture at left is the picture from the website, but a good idea of what it's like. We were there during the daylight and then decided to take a break and get some ice cream before going back in after dark. It was cool seeing the night lights of the surrounding cities in the mountains. See some more pictures of the onsen here.



Above I'm hanging out in the relaxation room where we got awesome massages for $2 (20 minutes) in the ritzy massage chairs. They are better than any of the other places I've been, even massaging your legs, thighs, hands, etc all at once! After we read and relaxed and cooled down, we headed back into the baths for our night view.

Then we got back in the car, and despite a short detour (oops! got a tidge lost!) we ended up at a specialized curry restaurant just in time to order before closing. I got a great beef curry and rice with naan on the side. A great night cap to our girls' day! Hope you all enjoyed the weekend!

Random Weekend of Fun

Happy Valentine's Day! I am not celebrating, but hope that all you couples out there had a romantic evening with your partners!

This Saturday, I went down to visit my friend Kari in Izunagaoka. Our friend Josh was there as well, and we set out to have the most random adventures we could. Well, our main goal was to see the early cherry blossoms in Kawazu as I said in my last post, but when I arrived, Josh and Kari proposed a plan to visit a boar amusement park. I reluctantly agreed, but the weekend conversation pretty much revolved around the boars from there on out.

We went out on Saturday night to one of my favorite pork cutlet restaurants that is one of Kari's regular eating establishments. I got my usual katsudon and Josh ended up drawing the attention of an older drunk Japanese man who chatted with our table for well over an hour!! The conversation was quite random and hilarious. At one point he told Josh to be a rabbit and eat his cabbage so he could be a strong sportsman, funny since Josh really only plays video game sports...and then the conversation digressed as the man at one point told us that his farts smell like lemon. Josh asked him about the boar amusement park, and we found out our hopes and dreams for the following day were crushed. It closed about 3 years ago, but they are still handing out brochures because Kari had gotten one about a year ago. We were hoping the man was so drunk that he didn't know, but unfortunately after an internet search, that wasn't the case.

The night was filled with randomness, including a free pen from the owners of the restaurant, free chocolates for Valentine's Day from the owner's of a really cool bar in Ohito with the walls and ceiling covered in album covers (and the bathroom covered in all women album covers....), and we capped off the evening watching some movie from Kari's childhood that she told us frightened her as a child, but was her brother's favorite video, so she was forced to watch it all the time...it was indeed frightening, even more as an adult!!

This morning we slept in a bit and then headed further down the Izu peninsula to Kawazu. The cherry blossoms line the river and you can walk up and down the path. There are many vendors selling food and souvenirs. This first picture looks quite unimpressive, but I wanted to give you an idea of the bigger picture down the river.

Here's a close up of some of the flowers. These cherry blossoms are much pinker than the regular ones that bloom later in late March and early April.


Kari and I enjoyed some sweet potato fries from one of the vendors. It was a nice relaxing walk that indeed made me see the light at the end of the winter tunnel. Even though we're wearing winter coats and hats, the weather is starting to warm up little by little and the blossoms definitely give the feel of spring!! Unfortunately we did see quite a bit of snow up in the mountains on the drive there though!

Also, one of the vendors that we bought dried fruit from was selling some boar!! After narrowly missing out on the amusement park where they had trained boars to jump through hoops and had boar races, we had to at least eat some boar to make the weekend complete. Josh and I split a boar kabob for about $1.50 each. It was pretty tasty, but pretty much just tasted like beef.

After the cherry blossoms, we made a short detour to Toi, another town on the west coast of the Izu peninsula. It boasts the world's largest flower clock at over 30 meters diameter. As the boar extravaganza was a no go, we had to settle for the clock. It turns out, we drove there pretty much for nothing as the clock is huge, but it isn't made of flowers anymore! There was a plaque about it's Guinness Book of World Records standing in 1991, but apparently they stopped making it out of flowers! It was all tile, and around it were a few barely still live flowers. They did however have a nice footpath around the clock that had some foot reflexology rock massage stuff.

Here I am testing out a few of the rocks:

And here I am in front of the clock. Note the crappy flowers around it.

Across the street from the clock was a foot bath. The Izu is known for it's natural hot springs, so there are many spas and many foot baths around. This one was nice after a walk around the clock with the rocks.

Like I said, Happy Valentine's Day! I am off to get some sleep. This week is full of interview tests and essay grading. It's the end of the school year here, so the students are finishing up all their classes and getting ready for graduation in March!

Keeping Busy

During the second half of last year I started to become a bit of a hermit, and since going home this summer I have really started to get out and take advantage of my time again. Here are just a few of the things I have been up to:

I went to an okonomiyaki restaurant with some Japanese friends. We were actually going to get Indian food, but our local Indian restaurant is taking a hiatus and doesn't open again until the end of this month. I don't really like okonomiyaki much, but I tried a few new types of things that I enjoyed! Okonomiyaki is often translated as a Japanese pancake, but it's really nothing like a pancake like you would envision. It's usually cabbage, some other veggies and chunks of meat, egg and some type of batter (but only a little bit to hold it together). You mix it all together and fry it, flip it, and then cut it in pieces to eat. It's usually topped with a special sauce, mayo, and sometimes fish flakes or shredded sea weed. Here's a video of the flip:

Remember if you're reading this in an email, you'll have to go to my blog to watch it.

I also tried a new thing that's like the omelette/pancake thing above - it's a mix of ingredients but isn't eaten in the pancake form, but more like a...stirfry? Not exactly, but my English is failing me these days, so see below:

The bowl of ingredients before mixing it.

Chiaki mixing in the the sauce to give it good flavor.

I also organized a rafting trip for AJET along with the vice president. It's quite near my house actually. so I had a few people come up to stay with me the night before and we just drove there. There were about 30 rafters in all, so quite a large group. It was a good time. Like last year the rapids weren't really that big, but we had fun in the water and in good company!

Our Raft Left to Right: Me, Kory, Kelly, Jaime and Dion

One of our team's rafts in the rapids

After rafting, we went to hana no yu, my favorite onsen and second home! The wine bath is back, though a different type of wine, so I am one happy girl! After onsen I road tripped it with a new friend out to the Izu peninsula and went to dinner with John and Kari. We scoped out a new bar in the "Nag" and stopped to soak our feet in a foot bath along the way. Apparently they are all over the city there, I wouldn't mind living there for the foot baths!!

Can you tell which feet are mine? ;)

So life has been good, hope it's as good there as it is here! Love you and miss you all!

Ash

p.s. After writing all this, I realized I had already blogged about some of it, but this time pictures are included, so I'm not deleting all this work!