Overdue & Abbreviated

A very quick vacation round-up:

Wednesday: drove to southern Awaji Island, camped on the ocean. I proved how utterly horrible I am at building a fire.

Thursday: Up at dawn, catch whirlpools between Awaji and Shikoku, but due to low tide they aren't exactly whirling. Spend the morning seeing the first temples of Shikoku's famous 88-temple pilgrimage, then hit an onsen and head towards Iya Valley. By the time we reach Iya, typhoon rains (seriously, not an exaggeration)are in full effect. Camping is not fun, but we stick it out.

Friday: Rain and the road conditions (all single-lane, curvey, up-and-down) make travel in the valley hard, so we only get to do half - if even - of what was planned. Spent a good chunk of the day at Chiiori house (expect a full post on this soon) and then headed east and checked into a hostel. It rained with only brief pauses the entire day.

Saturday: It finally stops raining as we leave the valley, but landslides and a number of other causes have shut down the few roads out of the valley. Each road proves even narrower, steeper, and more frightening than the last. Every time we think we find a detour, we get another closure. We have to change our destination entirely and end up heading back east instead of to the southern tip. We finally reach Tokushima city at about 5pm and at this point have spent about 8 hours driving about 100 kilometers (~60 miles). This was not fun. We head into the city for the evening and try to forget everything that happened on the drive.

Sunday: Tokushima proves to be a blessing after the previous day. We get in some hiking to make up for the rained-out trip planned in Iya and then see a few more of the 88 temples before heading home. On the way, we make an impromptu stop at a coastal beach and have a great time. Colleen's wedding ring ends up in the ocean and now both of ours are underwater somewhere. We finally arrive home at 8pm salty, smelly and in need of showers.

It was a pretty great trip despite the weather & road dramas. Next vacation: USA, in three weeks.

Mike

Vacation Photos

I'm still recovering, and don't have a lot of typing in me just yet, but here are some of my favorite pix from our trip:


Sunrise over ocean storm


Statue at Buddhist temple


Iya Valley


Famous Peeing Boy statue in Iya


Tanuki outside Tokushima Youth Hostel


Colleen, water, reflection, etc.

-Mike

Vacation

We will be out of the office until next Monday. For urgent matters, look for us on sunny beaches.

Rice Fields, Baseball Fields

There's something awesome about stadium lights. Living downhill from the local sports complex, we get great views like this most nights in the summer. I hate light pollution, but for some reason can't begrudge the field of sport. Something magical/mythical in it, I guess.

Mike

Ghost in the toilet!

It happened

last summer, during my first days here at Iwa High School. One day, the brass band students invited me up to the band room since they heard I could play drums. What an embarrassment! Our brass band girls are all savvy musicians, who spend hours each day practicing, and they perform often as well.
Anyway, my first week, I was given the drumsticks by the drummer herself, and managed to patter out a couple simple rock beats. Oh, but they wanted to see me rock out! It was one of those times in life I wished I could close my eyes, and let divine intervention take over, like in teen movies. Alas, instead I sheepishly explained that I never practice, and never had any lessons (except I did get pointers from my girl Andrea, but I didn't want bring that up). While Aki was showing me up on the drums, and sympathetically teaching me some new stuff, another girl threw the band room door open, yelling something I couldn't understand, and frantically gesturing for us to come to the bathroom ("toire"). She did offer a word to help me understand; "GHOSTO!!"
We followed her to the toilet, and she showed us how one stall door wouldn't close all the way. What??That's it?? Maaaybe,I suppose, you could say it looked like someone was hiding behind the toilet door. She demonstrated that when you push on the door, it wouldn't move. Just enough room for a person to be hiding. She was sqealing and laughing, along with the others.
I didn't get it!!!
Obviously, they knew there wasn't a ghost back there. Why all this drama, sqealing, and laughs about a ghost in the toilet from *high* school students????

The other day, a whole year after this "encounter", I finally find out the cultural charactor who may have been behind all that drama...

"TOIRE NO HANAKO"!!

A ghost named Hanako who lives in a high school toilet. Now it all makes sense.
She's a scary girl...




Toire no hanako-san seems to be a star of both animation and film. Feel free to google her for more... I hear the actress of the film, Kuriyama Chiaki also starred in Kill Bill.

By the way, isn't there a charactor like this in Harry Potter?

-Colleen

Air Conditioning... etc.

So it's finally breaking the upper 30's - 100's to you farenheighters, though as noted before temperature makes little difference in humidity like this - and we finally broke down and turned on our air conditioner. It's not that we were being stingy or trying to tough it out; we would have broke down a week ago, but the A/C can only be turned on by remote & neither of us could find the stupid thing. It eventually turned up on top of the A/C unit itself, a good seven and a half feet off the ground and hidden nicely from view. Guess I'll take the blame for that. Now if only we could get this thing to cool more than one room, it'd be perfect. As is, we now have a nice little escape pod from the insanity.

In other, completely unrelated, news: tonight we're going to meet the new ALT Julie for the first time. Guess we'll show her around a bit & then get some grub. We also rented RIZE and i'm psyched to check it out. It's good to have entertainment on hand while battling heatstroke.

Mike

Harinezumi manjyuu!

The cutest hedgehog you could ever eat! Complete with black seasame seed eyes.

The prize for being *closest* will have to go to Marlene for saying both "albino hedgehog" and "mochi".
Second prize for being *wildly imaginative* goes to Tricia. I'd love to see a chrysanthemum carved out of porcelain! But since you're in the States, you'll just have to wait much longer to get your prize. Lucky Marlene is in Japan ;)

Even though this hedgehog isn't mochi, it IS a bun ("manjyu") filled with sweet azuki bean paste (just like many of the mochi available). Oishii!

3 guesses

What is this?

You get 3 guesses, in 3 days. No more guesses after Friday!

Ichi, ni, san... Go!