Merry Christmas!
but I was surprised at how nice the water was, considering it was October.
I've got to get my posts from the end of the summer done so I can catch up to fall before winter starts! . . . so here's the next part:
Nagano, Hakuba, and Happo-One (pronounced "hah-poh-oh-nay") which hosted the Winter Olympics in 1998.
justice; it was fun to walk around that neighborhood and get a feel for the character of the city. We had a fantastic dinner in a wonderful restaurant there that had traditional "horigotatsu" seating (seating arrangements on Japanese tatami floors where there are sunken areas beneath the dining tables for comfortable leg room).
Continuing from part three:
these intricate designs, mostly by hand. For the basic outline, a stencil is occasionally used, and for geometric patterns, a compass is used, but all of the fine detail is done manually. As you can hopefully see in the close-up picture, each pattern is exactly the same. The amount of practice (and patience!) required is astonishing.
to give us a ride up the hill to the Kiyomizu Temple (from my previous post). On the way, he gave us a mini-tour of that area of Kyoto. He is an amazing artist and a kind and gracious host. Kashima-san, doumo arigatou gozaimashita!
her. As you can see from the pictures, she is NOT a small cat! Kewpie likes to hang out while we're having our lesson. She wanders around the room, chases dust bunnies, and jumps on the furniture, making a loud *THUMP* sound (she's one of the noisiest cats I've ever met, which makes her even funnier). Tamami, thanks for bringing Kewpie; maybe someday she'll learn to meow in English!
One of the most striking features of Nijō Castle are the "nightingale floors" in the corridors. To protect the occupants from sneak attacks and assassins, the builders constructed the floors of the corridors in such a way as to squeak like birds when anyone walks on them.After walking through that section and listening to the interesting sounds of the "security system floor", my brother commented that it was amazing workmanship that 400 years later the intricately constructed floor was still functioning exactly as it was designed to.
we got there just about 15 minutes before the grounds closed, but we saw as much as we could in the short time we had, and then continued looking around from outside the area that had been roped off. We could still see quite a bit of the temple complex from there, and I continued to take pictures.
shops and restaurants, partly along a small canal.
Everywhere I visited with them was amazing; we had a great time! The list of destinations: Tokyo (including Ueno Park and Asakusa), Kyoto, Nikko, Nagano City, the Sea of Japan near Joetsu, and Hakuba/Happo One (pronounced "hah-poh-oh-nay" -the city where many events were held during the '98 Olympics).
BTW, our English word rickshaw comes from the Japanese word "jinrikisha" 人力車, 人 jin = human, 力 riki = strength, 車 sha = vehicle, which means "human-powered vehicle". (If you see random letters or squares instead of Japanese characters in the previous sentence, just ignore it; it means your computer isn't set up to read Japanese.)
The day after we went to Inuyama, we took a train south into Mie Ken (Mie Prefecture). It was very beautiful, and even if it was kind of
crazy to go two hours far out of our way just to visit an amusement park, even the train ride there was great! Again, Jane's words are in blue:
The next morning we left early for Parque España. The train went through more pretty scenery - more out in the country with hills and then getting to see the seashore again. We went through one little town where pearl diving is a big tourist draw. It looked like a neat place to visit. We got off at what our directions said was
the correct station, only to be told by an employee at the station that we should have gotten off at the next one. We decided to go outside to the bus station, where a taxi driver told us where to wait
for a bus. After a while a bus came by that was actually a shuttle bus for the hotel or park employees, but they asked us if we were customers and let us on. There were signs in Spanish on the bus. They let us off at the park and there was no charge for the bus! The park was SUPER COOL. We went on the cool rides we had read about, and also the silly ones that were still fun. The "brilliant sparkling luminous carnival" whatever it was called ride was indoors and you sat in a sideways car that went along and turned to face different scenes like
Haunted Mansion at Disneyland, but everything was all sparkling lights with a flower & flamenco theme. The big coaster was awesome, and I lost track of all the inversions. It was also very smooth. It was a suspended coaster like the Batman Ride, and unlike some coasters, it had a couple really cool parts right at the very end rather than being anticlimactic. It looked like you were going to hit your feet on the ground at one point, and had a little zero-G hill, which I thought was unusual for a suspended coaster.
The mine train coaster had nice scenery
and was a lot faster than I expected. It was fun like Big Thunder Mountain Railway but with the speed cranked up several notches. Interwoven through it was the other
Montserrat-themed ride, the log flume ride. It was fun & not too wet. We went to the far end of the park where you walk quite a ways downhill through realistic Spanish village streets - they even had a little chapel and a wine shop. We went on the surprising long and good lagoon ride, and then discovered the “disco escalator” that Rob had read about in a park review: I
wasn't looking forward to walking clear back up the long hill, but there is a very long indoor escalator that takes you back up to the main level of the park. There is fun, pseudo-Spanish music and loads of flashy lights, and if you look closely on the rock-looking walls they have a couple replicas of paintings - something Picasso-looking and a famous prehistoric cave drawing from Spain. The park also has a ride designed for looking at the view - something like Great America's giant donut tower, except the rotating big seating area is
lifted up on a giant arm instead of going up a tower. It had a VERY nice view of the coastline and bay and Spanish-looking buildings and Spanish-looking hotel next door, and in the distance Japanese buildings - that part was a little surreal. Oh yeah, they even had a replica of the statue in the Plaza de Colon just like the real one.
This amusement park absolutely astounded me! It's one of the most fun parks I have ever visited. It's like Disneyland in that everything is impeccably themed (and the theming is actually, I think, more authentic looking than what is usually at a Disney park). BUT . . . it also has a couple of amazing thrill rides, like what you would find at a park like Magic Mountain. So I think it's the best of both worlds. Whatever you go to an amusement park for, they have it! AND, with almost no lines at all-we rarely waited more than five minutes to board anything and only waited more than ten minutes once: at the crazy bullfighting ring indoor roller coaster. That was truly a strange ride. It's an indoor coaster, something like SpaceMountain, but of course has a Spanish theme. Towards the end of the ride you enter a dark area, and the cars STOP. Suddenly, the lights turn on, and it looks like you're in the middle of a bullfighting ring; a trumpet fanfare plays, the cars start heading for a wall, and it opens, sending you into the
final part of the ride. VERY creative (and strange!) The
super roller coaster that Jane mentioned was SO intense, that even I (crazy roller coaster maniac!) could only go on it four times. One other note about the theming-there's a huge building that houses the area where stage shows are performed. Rather than just have the top of a big, ugly building in the middle of the park, they took the time to decorate it to look like Roman ruins
! (You can see that in the long, panorama picture I posted.)
An absolutely fantastic park, but as I mentioned, not many people, so I'm afraid that if business doesn't increase, at some point it may close, which would be terrible for such an awesome park. So, anyone even slightly interested in amusement parks in Japan-please go and support their wonderful creation!
This is the next part of my sister's visit. She went to visit a friend in Osaka by herself for one day. The following day her friend Nancy and I took the shinkansen to Nagoya (about an hour closer to here) to meet her. Again, Jane's words are in blue.
I then proceeded to Nagoya station, where I arrived just a few minutes before Nancy & Rob were due so I was able to guess which train was theirs and meet them right on the platform. We went to our hotel where we were able to check in early. Rob had found a last-minute deal on a
four-star hotel. The rooms we had were actually not very large but it was extremely clean with extremely comfortable beds and nightshirts provided. Then we set out for Inuyama where the ukai (cormorant fishing) is, about a half-hour train ride away. A big outdoor wooden map of the city at the station had north at the top, but you were facing south looking at it, so was glad I had my compass in my purse. Unfortunately the map also seemed to imply that we had to cross the river to get to the fishing area. We had well over an hour, and enjoyed a walk down a little street with very old buildings – it would be a cool place to spend a whole day or two. Finally, we got to the river, crossed it on a large dam, realized we were on the wrong side of the river and still had a long walk to get to the boat dock. I was pretty sure there was no way we were going to make it to the boat on time (we had a reservation). We got near the other bridge and started running and made it to the boat dock just in time, to my great relief. We boarded a long, low boat with tatami mats in it - they gave us plastic bags to put our shoes in while on the boat. We headed down the river and picked up several more passengers at a hotel downstream - Japanese tourists. It was lots of fun trying to converse with them. They were talking and laughing and kept asking Rob questions. One man kept making funny gestures, we weren't sure what he was trying to convey except part of it had to do with fishing or food, it was very amusing. The sun had set and we were below a castle up on a hill that they light up at night, and which I found out later is one of the oldest wooden castles in Japan (not one that has burned down and been rebuilt). The boat had a roof with paper lanterns with candles burning in
them hanging down. The boat ride was so neat I thought that
alone was worth the ticket price. Then we motored back upstream to where there were other spectator boats and the fisherman's boat came out. That was really amazing to watch. There were three men in the fisherman's boat and they had a fire burning in a big metal basket hanging over the water. They periodically pounded on the boat floor with a pole - not sure if that was to attract the fish or signal the birds. The actual fisherman had on traditional garb including a straw skirt (right next to the fire!) and had several birds on leashes, who just bobbed along swimming next to the boat and
would periodically dive for fish. When the fisherman saw a bird had caught a fish, he would pull in the bird and make the bird spit out the fish into a basket and toss the bird back in the water, where it would bob along again like everything was fine. The birds are trained when they are young and live with the fisherman. The whole night-time scene with the fire reflecting in the water and everything really made it all extra amazing - was really one of those “had-to-be-there” experiences. I was really glad we got to see it. That style of fishing has been done for hundreds of years. It is no longer an economically feasible way to make a living, so the
government sponsors it as an "intangible cultural asset".
As Jane said, the whole thing was completely amazing. When we were both children, our family had a book that described cormorant fishing. We both still remember the book, and I think Jane was inspired to arrange that part of our trip mostly because of that memory. That made the experience even more incredible. Sorry some of the pictures are rather dark, but hopefully you can get the idea (especially if you click on them for the larger size).
Next: Parque Espana!!!
As I did when my cousin was here, I am going to take my sister's account of her trip, and use it as the start of my blog entries. My words will be in black, and hers will be in blue.
We went to Edo Wonderland, the Edo themed park. It was very cool & realistic - a reproduction of an Edo-era city. No rides, just the buildings and exhibits and some activities. There was a cool parade of elaborately costumed people. All the restaurants and kitschy souvenir shops were sort of disguised behind screens & doors of the buildings, so the street scene looked quite realistic. They even had live chickens in a basket cage along the street, and wide, deep street gutters with koi. There was a cool thing where two "Edo police" chased a ninja up the streets and to a bridge right where we were standing, and the ninja threw these guys off the bridge (actually they ran up to the rail and flipped over it) down into the small river several feet below, that was cool.
Many tour books only mention Edo Mura in passing, or even dismiss it as being a tourist trap, but I thought it was a very cool experience. In fact, I would definitely go back! There were some diorama scenes with wax models that were a bit gruesome, but when I showed pictures of them to the locals here, many people recognized the scenes as being important parts of Japanese history. Jane decided to join one of the scenes, but was later arrested by Edo policemen! After that, Jane and I fought off a fierce ninja attack-I have pictures to prove it! Look! All silliness aside, it was a very beautiful place, and much more culturally informative than I expected.
