It has been an extremely action-packed week. I’ll try to recap as quickly as possible and let the photos do most of the talking.
Last Wednesday I headed off to Wakayama to visit my brother and his current and former host families. We mostly did the same things we always like to do when we’re together: played basketball and made some cookies for his host brother’s birthday. Sawa joined us on Thursday and we all went off to the beach. It was good fun for us, but I don’t think beach going is really a big thing for most Japanese women, because except for Sawa, neither the host mothers or daughters seemed to want to swim, or tan, or do much except sit in the shade.
Afterwards we did the old onsen thing and Kel and I got our first chance to drink iced coffee together after an onsen.
That night we had a birthday celebration for Kel’s host brother, where we had kimchi nabe and then ate the delicious cake and cookies back at their house.
On Friday, we all got up at the crack of dawn (which was to become a theme of the next few days) to take the bullet train up to Yokohama, where Mum was meeting us that night. Kel had to go off to see some friends in Saitama and the following day me, Mum, Sawa and her parents and grandparents all went off to Hakone for the weekend. It was super-nice and ridiculously luxurious, with an amazing inn and amazing food and great baths and sightseeing.
After a delicious breakfast and a quick bath, I had to leave everyone behind and rush back to Tokyo for the wedding of my old friend Yuriko who I’d only seen once in the last 7 years. Unfortunately, I’d forgotten to bring all the appropriate clothes, so I’d had to bust some pieces of my own wedding tuxedo when we were back at Sawa’s place, but I didn’t have a jacket and I had to make do-it-yourself cufflinks from a pin and a piece of plastic I salvaged from a trash can at the train station. It was really cool to see a couple of old friends from my exchange trip days, and hopefully now I have their contact info we can stay in better touch.
The following day (Monday), Mum, Kelly and Oli all converged on Sawa’s grandparents’ apartment in Yokohama and we did our last-minute shopping and packing for our ascent of Mt. Fuji, then woke up at 5am the following day to get on the bus to take us to our target.
We were all a little uncertain of what to expect, because many people had been warning us it would be too much for my mum to handle, but there are so many people who climb Mt. Fuji and the Japanese tend to be a little over-protective. As we started our tour and saw that there were plenty of middle-aged and even elderly people, plus one 7-year-old kid in our group, we started to relax and think it would be a breeze. This was confirmed as we started taking excessive breaks after just a few minutes walking, and we started laughing at how easy it was and these silly Japanese people who were all kitted up with hard-core mountain climbing gear and water-proof packs.
Of course, after we’d gone for a couple of hours there was a huge hailstorm, the temperature started dropping and the thin air started getting to us, and we realized that maybe it would’ve been a good idea to bring rainproof packs, and that maybe the excessive breaks had prevented us from getting altitude sickness. It was a good thing that it was only a 24-hour kind of hike because the warm clothes I had packed got totally soaked in my bag, which would’ve been a serious problem if it was a longer hike.
After a 7-hour hike up to our mountain lodge, we had a funny face competition with this awesome kid
Then grabbed a few hours of sleep and woke up at 1am to trudge the final 2 hours to the summit. Seeing the line of headlamps of the thousands of other climbers snaking up and down the mountain side in the dark was pretty cool. The feeling of arriving at the top and then watching the sunrise over the unkai (sea of clouds) was pretty awesome.
We climbed down in about a third of the time it took us to get up, but because it was so steep it was actually more painful on the legs than the climb up. At the bottom we napped for a couple of hours, then our group all took a well-deserved clean-up at an onsen, where I taught Oli the joys of the post-onsen iced coffee (well, just milk in his case).
After returning, Kel and I wanted to have an epic experience, so instead of collapsing after Mt. Fuji like we probably should have, we went out for an all-nighter to a club in Shibuya, where we saw this awesome Engrish sign.
It rubs the lotion on its skn…
After taking the first train back and meeting Mum on her way to catch the first shinkansen back to Kyoto, we collapsed for a much-needed sleep. Kel and Oli went their separate ways back, and I went to meet Sawa and watch “Gake no ue no ponnyo”, the new Miyazaki Hayao movie. I’d been super-excited, because I LOVE Miyazaki Hayao, and although it wasn’t as good as my favourites (Laputa, Spirited Away, Totoro), it was still really awesome and cute and much better than Howl’s Moving Castle and Gedo Senki. It turns out this is the first actual Japanese movie I’ve seen at a Japanese theatre. Afterwards, we had a delicious ice cream at Sawa’s favourite place at the mall.
Finally, yesterday we got up early to go see an exhibit of Sawa’s aunts in Tokyo then cleaned up the apartment and had a fun night with both sides of Sawa’s family, having a delicious dinner and then watching this big fireworks disply from Sawa’s grandparents’ apartment.
(Sawa’s pic, of course)
It turned out that this was the first time ever that both sides of Sawa’s family were all together just by themselves (the wedding was the first time they were together at all), and everyone had a good time.
With full bellies and happy memories, we went home and slept, and now this morning I got to sleep as long as I wanted for the first time since before I left for Wakayama. Yay!!!
