Shirakawa Pt. 2

H'okay. Part deux!
Day two: Gorgeous gardens, tea ceremony, baby's first castle, dharma pantings, sleeping at a Buddhist temple. Day three: museum, carving a stone necklace, hooome

We leave the ryokan and head back into Shirakawa-shi to go to Nanko Park - the first park ever built in Japan, back in 1800. We attend a tea ceremony, sort of. It's not a proper ceremony - the tea master talked a lot in Japanese, which hardly any of us exchange students understood, and the Japanese organizers didn't translate. They gave us tea and just showed us how to turn the cup, but it wasn't actually a proper ceremony like I saw in high school. We mostly enjoyed the heated tatami mats and looked out the nice big windows at the garden. Once we finished at the tea house, we wandered around the garden for a while. So gorgeous...




Following the teahouse and garden, we went to visit Shirakawa Castle. Pretty beautiful and imposing from the outside, but tiny within... Just one room, with steep stairs going up another two or three levels. I started to call it "Baby's First Castle," since it didn't really seem to have much room for a family!



We left the castle and went on to paint our own dharma (or "daruma") dolls. Dharma was an Indian Buddhist saint. Daruma dolls are red paper-made dolls that have a weight added to the bottom, allowing it to always bob back up when its knocked over. It suggests invincible will power and is often used as a mascot for good luck. Painting is rather hard though.... You make a wish, and paint in the eyes once the wish comes true.
Before being painted

My daruma doll... Haha.


Finally we head to our last destination for the day: a Buddhist temple where we will spend the night. It's unheated (in the morning, we could see our breath in the air) and the room we slept in had some rather intimidating paintings...


We go to a hotel (heat!!) for dinner and a farewell party, then go back to the Buddhist temple to drink and chat some more. No one slept very well - up late talking, and the clock in the room played a song and counted off the hour every hour... I'm a light sleeper and it woke me up almost every time, sigh.

We wake up at 7 for meditation at 7:30. Whoever thought of trying to make sleep-deprived college students wake up abysmally early and sit with their eyes closed for 30 minutes... :p Then breakfast of picked radishes, pickled plums, salty strips of seaweed, and a rice porridge thing. I didn't eat a much for breakfast.
Meditation

Breakfast

All the statues at the temple were wearing little hats and jackets or bibs.


After leaving the temple, we head to the Shirakawa Field Museum. It's a small museum focusing mainly on the Jomon era or Japan, and other early history. We get to carve a necklace out of soapstone or some other soft stone, using sandpaper. I quite enjoyed it, and now have a nice worry necklace, although my hands cramped up like crazy from sanding so much (and I also sanded my fingernails and fingers, ouch). Ramen for lunch (apparently a Shirakawa style of ramen is quite famous. All I know is that it was hot and tasty! Mmm, hot food). We stop at a small baked goods/ice cream shop (150 yen/$1.50 ice cream! Yum) and head home... to SHOWERS and sleep!

So, yes. :) A very fun trip, quite an interesting experience, and it was nice to get out of Tokyo for the first time.

Shirakawa part 1

So! Back from Shirakawa. Overall pretty fun trip, think I made some new friends so whee. (One goes to Georgetown! One is from CT and I happened to show her a photo of a mural dad did - she stares at it for a minute, then goes, "Did he do a hair salon in Wilton like 13 years ago?" "Uh... As a matter of fact, yes he did." "My dad's girlfriend owned it! I remember thinking how beautiful the art was!" "HOLY SHIT SRSLY??" It's a small world.)

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. :)