Road Trip!

This weekend was a three day weekend, so I went on a road trip with Amy and Hollie. I was rather fortunate to be invited along, actually. We went to Takamatsu and Naoshima in Kagawa prefecture. It's still on Shikoku, but it's a bit of a drive. Unfortunately, neither Hollie or I have licenses here, so Amy had to do all the driving.

On Friday morning we met up at Hollie's and started on our way to Takamatsu. There was a bit of a delay because there was snow on the roads and part of the expressway was closed. We waited a little while to see if the expressway would open back up, but in the end we had to exit the expressway partway there and take smaller roads. This meant that we were on narrower, windier roads, and parts of the drive were a bit like being in Idaho. We drove along a section of river that Mom, Brett and I had gone along during the train ride from Okayama to Kochi.

Partway to Takamatsu, we stopped at Konpirasan Temple in Kotohira. It was a pretty cool temple at the top of several long sets of stairs. There were a lot of souvenir shops to gawk at along the way, so that gave us excuses to take breaks from climbing. One of the hazards of the temple was snow falling off of roofs and trees; all of a sudden you would hear a CRASH! behind you and look back to see a pile of snow where you had just been standing. I got nailed once or twice along the way. At one of the main parts of the temple, I threw a 5 yen coin (apparently the luckiest kind) into the box and attempted to pray. I clapped my hands twice like I was supposed to, but bowed a bit ungracefully as my purse fell off my shoulder and smacked into the wooden collection box.

After taking some pictures at the uppermost level of the temple, we turned around and headed back down. On the way back we spotted a crazy looking guy with flaming red-orange hair and black harem pants. Hollie and I tried to surreptitiously take his picture. I think I got a few good shots. It gave me the idea that it might be kind of entertaining to have a photo album of pictures of strangers taken at famous places. You know, take a picture while they're posing in front of a monument, except they're people you don't really know. Who knows if I'll actually get around to it, though.

We drove the rest of the way and made it safely to Takamastu. We stayed at the Century Hotel, which was clean if not fancy. The people at the reception were all incredibly polite and welcoming. After checking in, we used the remaining daylight to wander down to a covered shopping arcade called Hyogo Machi. It's a lot like Obiyamachi in Kochi, but much wider and longer. For dinner we picked a shop more or less at random. On the menu we had read "kani miso" (crab miso) and assumed that it was miso soup with crab. That sounded decent, so we all ordered it, along with a few other dishes to share. It turns out that kani miso is actually a mixture of crab paste and miso paste. It was a nasty green-brown color and the texture was incredibly unpleasant. The flavor wasn't exactly great, either. Amy ate all of hers, Hollie managed most of it, and I only had two or three bites before I gave up. Fortunately, the other food we ordered was very good. We had grilled asparagus, fried chicken, fried oysters (okay but not my favorite), and I forget what else.

The plan for Saturday was to go to Naoshima, a small island in the Seto Inland Sea. However, when we woke up to catch the morning ferry, the sky was steel gray and it was snowing heavily. Not great weather for bicycling around the island to view the outdoor art exhibitions. We decided to stay in Takamatsu for the day. Our first stop was the Youme Mall, but when we arrived a little after 9:00 it wasn't open, so we turned around and went to visit Ritsurin Park. Ritsurin Park is a large and famous garden which has something blossoming at pretty much any time of year. Though the weather was still pretty awful, we needed something to do and all of us wanted to see the plum trees. So we went.

I think Ritsurin was my favorite sightseeing part of the trip. There was a horribly cold wind blowing and it was alternating between snow and light rain for most of our visit, but the plum grove was incredibly beautiful. There were trees in colors from creamy white all the way to fuchsia. My favorites were the hot pink ones. We spent a good deal of time taking pictures of them. Elsewhere in the park, there was a small house that had been used as a tea ceremony school, a larger tea house, and some picturesque bridges. There were a good number of people in the park despite the weather, including a large tour group all carrying green umbrellas. In the park there was also a larger building with an exhibition of Hina Matsuri (Girls' Festival) dolls for sale. There were some beautiful ones, and some rather odd ones. For Hina Matsuri, a set of dolls is displayed in the home. There is always a king and a queen, and in larger sets they have various retainers and companions. They can be very simple or very elaborate. Our hotel had an impressive set with several tiers of dolls.

We spent about an hour and a half in the park, then drove back to the mall. Hollie and Amy were on a mission; they wanted to go to a store called Lush. There are apparently only two in all of Shikoku, if I remember correctly. Lush is a store with bath and beauty products made largely from natural ingredients. Most of what they sell is rather expensive, but apparently it is very high quality. I spent about 2,000 yen on some bath bombs and a face wash that Hollie strongly recommended; Amy spent about 7,000 yen; and Hollie spent 8,000 yen. After that we browsed a few shops, but didn't spend a whole lot of time in the mall. One awesome thing we did find was a bakery with cheese buns. They were huge bread buns with chunks of cheese in them, and they were very delicious. Another fun thing we did at the mall was purikura. Purikura, as I think I've mentioned in another post, is a type of photo booth that prints your photos as stickers. They're very entertaining. The one we used had a feature where it enlarged your eyes. Amy came out of it looking kind of like a freak in some of the shots, but mostly our photos turned out really nicely.

After the mall, we went back to the hotel for a short break. An unfortunate development on Saturday; I discovered that one of my contact lenses was torn, so I ended up wearing my glasses for the rest of the weekend. It turns out that my glasses don't fit so well as I thought they did. They pinch my nose and even after being adjusted, they still sit too high up. If I want to watch my footing going up and down stairs, I have to tilt my head down or I'll end up looking below the bottom edge of my lenses (and being unable to see what I'm trying to look at). However, I did discover that my glasses look quite nice on me. Anyhow, after resting a bit, we walked from the hotel to the harbor and found where the ferry to Naoshima leaves from. Then we started searching for somewhere to have dinner. Philip, another ALT from Kochi, was also in Takamatsu and had agreed to meet up with us for dinner, but we hadn't picked a spot. We ended up working our way back to Hyogo Machi and finding an udon restaurant there. Kagawa Prefecture is famous for udon, so it seemed like we had better try it at least once while we were in Takamatsu. I had tempura udon (udon noodle soup with some fried things on top), and it was very tasty. I'm not sure I could really tell what made it different from udon in other parts of Japan, but at least I can say I've eaten it. It was nice meeting up with Philip, but we all had to kind of try not to wince at some of his horrible puns. Puns are his favorite form of humor, and while it's impressive how quickly he can come up with one, it can be painful to listen to several of them per hour.

Once we'd had dinner, we returned to the hotel and made an early night of it. Our plan was to catch the early ferry to Naoshima if the weather was half decent. Sunday morning turned out to be much better than Saturday; the sky was mostly blue, and though it was cold and windy, there was no precipitation. The harbor was calm, whereas the previous day there had been huge waves. We took the ferry over at 8:15 and rented bikes at the port on Naoshima. We didn't have a whole lot of time, but we managed to ride around most of the island and saw a few of the larger art exhibits. The most entertaining ones, to my mind, were two giant pumpkins. One was red with black spots and the other was yellow with black spots. At the yellow pumpkin, a Japanese guy working at a station there took some forced-perspective pictures for us that made it look like we were alternately holding and eating the pumpkin. At 11:30, we took the ferry back to Takamatsu and headed out of town.

We made it back to Kochi safely, and now I am contemplating laying out my materials for tomorrow. I'm at the junior high so I don't have a lot of responsibility for teaching, but the English teacher has asked me to prepare a 10 minute activity for the students at the start of class. I'm hoping it'll go well. I'll be with the first years tomorrow, and they can be a real pain in the ass. I just hope they'll cooperate so the teacher won't regret putting me in charge of something. This is a pretty new development. Last week another teacher invited me to come up with an activity for the second years and it worked fairly well, so I think she might've suggested it to the teacher I'm working with tomorrow. Anyhow, I've had a good weekend, so I shouldn't complain. Wish me luck...