One Mountain Down...

Today we climbed our first real mountain, Mount Hakkoda. This is the mountain that is behind us in the pic of us after we went bamboo picking. It has an elevation of 1,500 meters (do the math yourself!). It is a real volcano with a crater on the top but don't worry it is dormant. We went with our good friend and co-worker, John, who is also the head of the mountain-climbing club. We began the day bright and early, 6:30am!

We climbed to the top of this thing, the one in the middle. This is from the onsen (hot spring) which is at the beginning of the trail. The onsen is famous for its sulphur minerals and smelled like rotten eggs :) yummm

We stopped at a semi-halfway point in the marshlands. We were in a kind of valley surrounded by mountains. The mountain on the right is Hakkoda.

We finally reached the top, 2.5 hours later! Unfortunately it was a bit hazy out so we couldn't see Mt. Iwaki (our mountain) or Aomori from it, so here's a picture of us instead, just about as good as the scenery!

We even had to do some trekking through the snow both up and down the mountain..

Lastly, we visited Hell's gates, a little sulphur pond that is so hot it steams.

We had to ask a random taxi driver to take our picture (with Hakkoda in the distance, by the way, that is John!)

A Day in Aomori

So, last weekend we went to Aomori City, the capital of our prefecture (which is like state), with Ako, one of our friends and English co-workers. Aomori is a seaside town so we went up in one of the tallest buildings of Aomori that is right by the ocean to see the sights!

We also went to an import shop and bought some yummy American food, and then we headed to the aquarium!

This aquarium was really cool because it had an area where you could pick up different ocean animals like starfish, hermit crabs, and other weird undear-sea things!!!

There was also a dolphin show. This was a lot of fun, neither one of us have ever been to a dolphin show so we really enjoyed it! Here is a video of the dolphins!

Pics!

We added our Picasa Web Album link on the right if you want to look at some more of our pics! We didn't put all of them on there b/c that would be ALOT, but we thought you might like to see some more of Japan than what we can fit in our blogs! We love and miss you all!

Pickin' Mountain Vegetables!

On Sunday Haruna invited us to go pick mountain vegetables with Seth and her dad so early Sunday morning we headed to Lake Towada to pick bamboo! We decided that looking for mountain vegetables is much cooler than mushroom hunting because you have to plunge your way through the thicket to find the vegetables!!

This bamboo shoot in the middle of the picture above is what we were looking for!

Here's Angie with a nice bag full of them (though most of them were found by Travis!!)

And here we are with all of our goodies at the end!!!

After all that pickin' we went and looked at some of the sights!

Here is Lake Towada itself! This lake was formed by a volcano- beautiful!

And this is Mount Hakkoda, also very breathtaking!!!

It was a busy Sunday but was a lot of fun! Hopefully we will get to pick mountain vegetables again!

Earthquake!!!

It is offical! We have felt our first earthquake at 8:45 am. It was big enough to wake Angie out of bed (who thought that Travis was trying to be funny by shaking the bed to wake her up!) It lasted probably over 30 sec. And it was really cool because it was pretty small. Only one DVD fell over so that was good. Sorry no pictures of that one!!

The Long Weekend

Last weekend we had five days off, from friday to tuesday. It was the regional competition between all high schools in all sports. (Our school came away with 4 championships in soft baseball, girls swimming, and boys and girls kendo). So, we did not waste a minute of our vacation....

Thursday night was spent in the sea side town of Ajigasawa at the Elliot's (the three in front). The Elliot's lead the English service we attend on sunday. It was Chris' birthday on thrusday (guy in the back) so a bunch of people went up to celebrate.

Friday was spent in Fukarura (or something like that) with Chris and Nick. It is a decent sized fishing town with spectacular views of the sea! We basically just hung out in the town and walked around at various sights.

There were a bunch of rocks just off the shore that you could walk to and climb around on. It was really beautiful!!

On saturday night we put on our singin' style on and went out for our first night of karaoke, which was awesome! They have every english song you can think of plus all the popular japanese songs. We sang songs like Pour Some Sugar on Me, I Want to Hold Your Hand, and Rocky Raccon (that one goes out to Shelly Appelgate!).

On the last day of our vacation we decided to go for a bike ride out to our school, but we didn't stop there...we went on to the nearest town of Owani. I total the ride took a little over 45min. Owani is a small town just inside the mountains. When we got there just took a ride around the town to check out the area. Owani in japanese means alligator hence the large alligator.

All in all a good weekend full of adventure!! Only a month until summer break!

Afternoon Trot

This week we have had half days all week and a 5-day weekend b/c of the "Sports Day" event this weekend for our prefecture (similar to states in the US). All the sports teams for schools in Aomori prefecture compete against one another for nationals, so all the sports have to practice extra hard, which gives us teachers nice half days! Today we decided to go on a hike in some mountains about a mile from the school. Along the way we came to a little nook-in-the cranny well of fresh mountain water. They have a little station set up with cups and everything so you can drink fresh mountain water rite there or bring bottles and fill them up at the spring. While we were there a guy was filling up about 30-2 gallon size bottles!



























After we were refreshed we headed toward the real hiking spot. Most of the hike was on a paved road, but then we came to a nice little clearing that said there was only 400 meters left til you reach the top, but to get there we had to go deep into the woods- in fact, in this clearing there was another nice little sign...










Luckily, we had no problems with the bears.. . what they should really warn about is the fact that the hike is straight up and down in very thick woods. We literally had to crawl up the hill using a very short walking stick to keep us from slipping!!!

(here's a pic of Trav trying his hardest to get up the mountain!)







Eventually (it took awhile and we were about dead) we reached the top, victorious! And then we realized they should also warn you, at the top there is no look-out that makes the incredibly hard hike worth it, instead you are surrounded only by trees that you definitely can't see past, and it was only about 4 feet wide all around!












This is a picture of our "path" taken from the "look-out" at the top of the mountain!











And then of course we had to climb back down the moutain, or more like, slide back down the mountain!!








This weekend you may see more adventures, keep watch!