First off, I misunderstood - we weren't going to Shirakawa-go (village) but Shirakawa-shi (city, though it was in the inaka - countryside). Not really in the mountains, pretty sad-looking and dilapidated. Ah well.
Day 1: Making soba noodles (with ridiculously huge knives), high school visit (Can I touch your hair? Are you going to marry your boyfriend?), crazy ryokan/onsen
We meet up at the ungodly hour of 6:45 am, get into Shirakawa around 11 am. First item of the day: learning how to make soba noodles! In an unheated room, which will soon become a theme of the weekend. We make them using just buckwheat flour and water, and get to cut up the noodles with MASSIVE KNIVES OF DOOM. Seriously, move over butcher knives - soba noodle knives could be stars of horror movies.
Very blurry, but you get the idea.
The house we made soba in.
Beautiful view and misty mountains from the soba place.
I'm not a huge fan of soba - especially when they're served cold, as these were. You dip them in sauce, but there's not a whole lot of flavor. And cold fold in an unheated room, when it's pouring outside, isn't all that nice. But it was an interesting experience. Some friends took some more interesting photos of me with knives... I'll be posting more pictures up as they get posted to facebook. :p
Following soba + eating them for lunch, we went to a high school. We were split into small groups and given a topic to discuss - for my group, what we usually eat at Christmas and New Years. That quickly changed into more general talking with our combinations of bad Japanese and bad English. I kept having girls exclaim over how "kawaii" I was... They told me my hair was beautiful, and asked if they could touch it. Haha. They asked if I had a boyfriend, I said sort of, back in the US - they started squealing and asked if I was going to marry him. Uh... :p They were very nice, it was just pretty funny. They also took tons and tons of pictures of us with their cell phone cameras.
After the high school, we headed up into the the start of the mountains to go to a ryokan. It had been pouring all day, so the roads were quite slippery, and when we got to the ryokan (where it was also snowing a bit, since it was higher)... we had a 5 minute walk down the steep, slippery Driveway Of Doom. They expect this to be accessible in the winter??
This picture taken the following morning doesn't really give it justice. Part of it is to the right, too.
At first we thought the ryokan was pretty awesome. It looked very neat inside, traditional, with creaky wooden floors and quite a maze of a place. There would be onsen! Yaay! It had kitties! MORE YAY. I was put in a room with the three girls who I would become pretty good friends with - they were already friends, but I think we clicked pretty well, I had a loot of fun with them.
Right inside:
The room (with kotatsu for keeping our footses warm):
Onsen kitty and uh.... my chest. I do not remember who took this picture for me but I think I may fire them. =p
We went to dinner, where my roommates and I discovered we were probably put together because we were all Special Foods people: one girl was allergic to crustaceans, I still hate fish/seafood, and the other two don't eat red meat.
After dinner, we decided to try and find an onsen to soak in! I love onsen! Unfortunately, it wasn't looking so good. First, one of our Japanese chaperone-guide-type-people thought the only hot springs we could use were ones that were outside. We did mention it was snowing a bit, right? And inside the building was generally unheated. Plus it was dark and unlighted and we couldn't see anything...
Outside hot spring, some brave soul tried it in the morning:
No. We asked someone who worked there, they pointed us to one that was upstairs (he also mentioned a co-ed one, but we weren't exactly comfortable with that when the girls went in to take a look and sad and old man squatting next to the pool, facing them with his legs wide open......). Up we went, but we didn't find anyone else going to it... We soon discovered why. The room was unheated and freezing. The water was ridiculously hot even for an onsen - we tried for about half an hour to get into it, and we just couldn't. We sat on the side, splashing water on ourselves to stay warm and alternately boiling our hands and freezing in the cold air. We eventually managed to get in if we kept our cold hands and feet out of the water, for a couple of minutes. We also wanted to wash our hair, etc - there were no showers, and we were told there were also no showers at the Buddhist temple we would be spending the next night at. We did a rather half-arsed job of that in the onsen, rinsing onto the floor, which you aren't generally supposed to do but we were pretty desperate... Finally we gave up and looked for everyone else. They had more success - there were private pools just beyond the co-ed bath, but you had to go outside briefly to get to them.
Ugh. Frozen and annoyed, we gave up.
None of us slept very well - we went from exhausted all day to lack of sleep silliness and spent a long time chatting. The unheated rooms made us very reluctant to get out of bed early the next morning. Breakfast wasn't a draw either - various pickled vegetables, seaweed, some kind of jelly thing... Fortunately I brought some clementines and food of my own. Not a fan of traditional Japanese breakfasts. :(
We left the ryokan and headed to a Japanese garden and tea ceremony~
Ryokan
To be continued! Need to study for my 3 quizzes tomorrow, I haven't even looked at the material yet... And NEED TO SHOWER. I hate hate hate not being able to shower every day. Freezing cold water from sinks doesn't really do it. :p
As always, Here are all my photos from the trip. :)
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