Part 2 of Part 2 of the 3 Day Tour

Sunday had us leaving the hotel bright and early to head to Gokayama. Gokayama is a World Heritage Site with around twenty gassho style houses that are hundreds of years old (the oldest is said to have been built some 400 years ago) and built using no nails. Architecturally, Gassho houses were built with steep roofs to allow snow to easily roll off them. Our first stop in Gokayama was the washi no sato center. Washi is Japanese style paper. The process itself is fairly interesting to learn about but the coolest part was that we got to make our own postcards!

Video explanation of how to make washi paper.

Here Xue and I making our postcards.

My postcards!

This is what they look like before the water gets suctioned out and they placed in a steamer.

This is all of our postcards drying on the steamer.

After that we explored the village for a little while until our guide hustled us off on an unplanned side trip to see a local tradition dance being performed. It reminded me a lot of the owara kaze no bon dances which makes sense because part of the meaning behind both was about having a good harvest. Here was another time where we got treated like celebrities. We arrived mid performance but as soon as there was a break one of the announcers welcomed us and Akeem was called forward to do some on the spot introductions of us and translation of what the speakers said in front of the crowd. Then afterwards we, "the foreign population," as Akeem called us, were invited to come forward and take pictures with the dancers. Considering the size of some of the cameras that were snapping photos of us I'm sure we ended up in another local paper.

This is one of the oldest houses (and me!)

We hiked up to get a view of the whole village, some of which you can see over my shoulder.

I thought this dance was actually pretty cool.

Akeem acting as translator.

The following videos are of the three types of dancers we saw:

Akeem, Sheila, David, me, Xue, Martyn with the dancers.

Sheila, Xue, and I posed with two of the dancers and some of their props. I wanted to keep that jacket :D

Lunch was a cute little local place where we all ordered soba or udon and ate onigiri that our guide had specially made for us with mushrooms from the mountain. We then departed to Tonami to go to the Tulip Gallery. The Gallery had some fascinating information and history about tulips in Japan and the indoor greenhouse was beautiful. I definitely want to go back to see the area in the spring.

The awesome wooden table at the restaurant we ate at.

Hot soba noodles, tofu, and dancing fish flakes = delicious!

Part 1 of Part 2 of the 3 Day Tour

Well I've done some interesting things since my last real update but they will remain shrouded in mystery until I finish talking about my trip. So picking up right where I left off: riding the Torokko was a lot fun. The scenery was amazing and the train sort or reminded me of the one I used to drive when I worked at the park. I really don't have the words to describe most of the scenery so I'll just stick to posting pictures and videos.

The train as it was getting ready to go into a tunnel.

We were by a river for most of the ride.

The leaves are just starting to change color.

I really don't know why there was a building that looked like a castle but it was cool anyways.

Cool bridge over the water.

When we arrived at Keyakidaira Station, the last stop, we explored the area and found a foot bath and some scenic spots to take even more pictures at. This is where I bought omiyage for one of my schools. I decided that since Monday was the day I would normally be at Jusan and Monday was the day that I was on the vacation that Jusan was the only school I would get omiyage for.

The final stop of the line.

A foot bath. It felt really good and they drained it shorty after we were done so we had great timing.

Finally, a group photo! Akeem, David, me, Xue, Sheila, and Martyn.

As we were hiking we had to pass though many dark tunnels. In one I actually managed to take what could possibly be considered an artistic photo!

The cool moss covered steps we climbed down to get to the area called Sarutobi or literally "jumping monkey." It got this because this area is the narrowest stretch in the Kurobe River and monkeys would jump across.

Sarutobi

That night we stayed in the Toyama Chitetsu Hotel. It was a basic business hotel and it was right by the Toyama train station. We each had our own rooms and they told us this was the sort of place that was comfortable but reasonably priced (as opposed to the place we stayed the next night, but I'm getting ahead of myself) and so would be a good place to recommend to visitors. I agree with their assessment. The room wasn't that big but the bed was comfortable, the bathroom was clean, the staff was friendly, and breakfast the next morning was fairly decent.

After depositing out stuff in our rooms we were treated to dinner at an izakaya. Like with many of the izakayas I've described before, we had out own room and ordered a bunch of little dishes to share. Afterwards we went out and karaoked. Even our shy chaperone who didn't speak much English sang a song. The place we went was fun because our room actually had a little stage you could go stand on and sing. No one was that concerned about staying up late because we knew we could just sleep on the bus the next day.

Akeem on the mini stage in our karaoke room.

A three hour (but really three day) tour!

Sept. 18-Sept. 20

Picking up right where I left off: the next place we went to in the Folkcraft Village was the Memorial Art Gallery of Gyuujin Takamura. He was a sumi-e painter famous for his kappitsugiho technique (ink painting with a dry brush) which made his pictures extremely expressive even when he only used black ink. We weren’t allowed to take pictures inside but I bought some postcards and have taken pictures of them for you to see. I also bought a wall print (only 200yen!) that I need to find a cheap frame for. Slowly my apartment is becoming more than just white walls. The following pictures are the postcards, the pamphlet we received, and the last one is the print.

Next we looked at the 500 Disciples of Buddah (or something like that…). Everyone in the world is supposed to be able to find their ancestor among these statues. I didn’t manage to find one with blond hair and blue eyes but maybe I just didn’t look hard enough. It was very interesting to walk among all the statues and there was one bigger one in the front. Although this seemed like a place of honor our tour guide explained that really this disciple was more or less in timeout for misbehaving. His statue was separate from all the others because he was being punished for drinking too much sake. Supposedly if you have an injury or some sort of pain you can rub that spot on the statue and your pain will go away.

The graveyard in front of the 500 statues.

Some of the 500 statues. Next to each one was that little post. I have no idea what it's for.

Side view of several of the many rows of statues.

Taken near the top of the hill, so these are the back of the statues.

This was closest I came to finding a statue with any sort of similarity to me...a guy in what looks like a Pope hat and holding what I decided was a bowl of food :D

The last thing we did while in the Folkcraft Village was to drink tea. I thought we were going to participate in the entire tea ceremony but when we got to the tea house we found out that the tea was already prepared. We sat down and were instructed on how best to enjoy our tea. First we had to eat the Japanese sweet that was prepared by cutting it into quarters and eating one quarter at a time. Then, while the sweetness still lingered, we were supposed to drink the tea after turning the cup twice with our right hand. Although the tea is bitter, the “lingering sweetness” did make it more palatable and I personally really like the frothiness of this style tea.

This is the sweet we ate. The stick coming out of the bottom right corner is what we used to quarter it.

Frothy green tea!

After this, the camera crew that had been following us around at the Village left and we were set to depart for lunch at Unazuki Beer Restaurant. The restaurant was a buffet and the food there was pretty good. However, we had more fun trying the three beers they make. We had our two chaperones worried because our initial plan was to order a pitcher of each three to share between the six of us. They were smart and told us that our after lunch activity involved a long train ride with no bathroom breaks so instead we decided to split a pitcher of one type and a glass of the other two beers between us. I think Aoki-san and Kato-san were relieved. I liked the beers especially the one we had in the pitcher. It reminded me of Blue Moon and myself and the other Americans even put an orange slice in it.

The three beers of Unazuki. We had a pitcher of the middle one.

This is a funny omiyage I found at the gift shop at the restaurant. As far as I can tell, it's a meat lollipop.

Next we hopped back on the bus to head to take us to ride the Torokko. This is a small train that goes through a beautiful area called the Kurobe Gorge. The sights were absolutely amazing and I would love to go back closer to autumn because the trees are supposed to be stunning. The translation for how the Japanese describe it is “five layers of color.” More details about this in my next post!

Step right this way to claim you prize

Sept. 14-Sept. 21

So classes are still going well. Now that I've finally done my last self intro (for a while at least), I'm enjoying the teaching side of things. Also, interacting with my students in and out of class is great. For example, while at Kubo ES last Wednesday I went and watched my 6th graders' music class. I was just walking around and stuck my head in one of the rooms they had split up into and a couple of the girls ran up to me and got all the people in the room to perform a song for me. They were very good. I was really surprised to see the students learning so many different instruments. There were kids playing everything from your typical recorder to an accordion. Then after the teachers gathered all the students back together, they played the whole song again with everyone performing this time. It was really fun and the kids seemed to appreciate that I wanted to watch.

Also of note for work last week, there was a demonstration class that all JHS ALTs and JTEs had to go to. Each year a school is selected to do this lesson and this year Katie was the lucky winner whose school got selected to do the class. I think it went pretty well for her but I know both her and her JTE were nervous with all the ALTs and JTEs and a couple of other miscellaneous education people standing in the back of the classroom. Afterwards there was a nice long discussion about the strong and weak points of the class. Unfortunately, much of this was done in Japanese that was far over my head. Afterwards, the four of us went out to an Indian restaurant to celebrate. The food was great and on the way we saw the most amazing rainbow I have ever seen. We could actually see where it began in the water. I guess leprechauns don't bother to bring their pots of gold all the way to Japan.

First sight of the rainbow!

That's the bay where the rainbow is originating. The truck provides a little perspective for just how big it appeared.

The last photo was taken while in the car but we actually stopped for some better pictures. No pot of gold...unless it's underwater or at the other end of the rainbow.

ROYGBIV

The best photo I could of the whole thing. It really was huge!

For a while there was a second rainbow above the first and at one point it even looked like there might have been a third but it didn't last long enough for a photo.

Besides the rainbow, the whole day was absolutely gorgeous!

These last two were both taken at the same time as the rainbow pictures.

You might remember from one of my previous posts that I mentioned a trip that I won. Well that trip was this weekend. Sat.-Mon. I was on a (free!!!) tour of Toyama with four other ALTs, a CIR, and two representatives from the Toyama Tourism Division. For those of you who don't remember (or who usually only look at the pictures in my blog) part of the requirement for this free tour was that we do something afterwards to spread the word about all the cool stuff they took us to go see. Well it just so I happens that I have a web blog in which I can write and post some of the gazillions of pictures I took this three day weekend. If I hadn't mentioned it before Monday was a national holiday in Japan (Respect for the Aged Day) so I had the day off from work. Basically, I plan to be pretty thorough about the places we went so I will be posting about this weekend over several entries. I hope you enjoy hearing about them at least half as much as I enjoyed experiencing them.

Saturday morning I woke up bright and early to catch the 7:29 train. I arrived almost an hour early. Unfortunately, this was the latest train I could catch to get to Toyama City in time for our 9:20 meeting time. I used the time to make sure I could find the meeting spot and then I explored the nearby area some. I stopped for breakfast at a little coffee shop that looked a little trashy on the outside but ended up having a real swanky interior. I'm glad I stopped because I hadn't really eaten yet and the food and iced coffee I ordered really hit the spot. An auspicious start to my adventure!

After my breakfast I met up with the others and our journey really began. Despite there being only eight of us on the trip we had an entire tour bus driving us around. We piled in and headed off to the Toyama Municipal Folkcraft Village. Here we got our first taste of being celebrities. There was a news station camera crew waiting for us as soon as we pulled into the parking lot. Also, waiting was our tour guide. The Folkcraft Village is actually composed of several different museums and sights. We went to the Toyama Medicine History Museum, the Memorial Art Gallery of Gyuujin Takamura, the 500 Buddha Statues, and we drank tea ceremony tea.

We weren't allowed to take photos in the Museum or Gallery but they didn't tell us this at first so I snapped a few photos. Toyama is where the Japanese traveling medicine men originated from and we were taught a little about how they would travel around the country and bring families the medicine they wouldn't be able to get otherwise. More than 300 years later, Toyama is still know for medicine as the traveling medicine men of long ago are now instead 100's of pharmaceutical companies.

Our tour guide leading us into the medicine museum.

A traveling medicine man. They were still around this century.

Quick shot before turning my camera off. You can see the display that showed how some of the medicine used to be made.

Now that I've given you the first taste of the many exciting experiences I had, you will have to wait with bated breath for the next installment of my action packed three day Toyama tour!