Southern Japan Sojourn

For the last week we have been touring Japan. We bought the Seishun Ju-Hachi ticket which allows you to ride the trains all day at a cheap price for 5 days of your choice. The catch is that the trains must be local, so that means they are really slow. We spent 3 days, from 6am to 10pm, just riding trains!! So we took along books to read, games to play, and movies to watch!



We had a little set back in our plans...Travis had to make a surprise visit to the ER the first day we arrived in Tokyo! We and the doctors, both in Japan and America :), think he had a kidney stone--Ouch!! "Yes, please everyone be sure to drink lots of water," pleas Travis. "You never never ever want to feel that much pain!" It was a little scary, but we trusted that the Lord would get him through it. Five hours later we were out of the hospital and on our way.

At the time Travis went into the ER, we were to meet up with one of Travis' high school pals. Obviously that didn't work out, but we were able to meet up for dinner at Outback Steakhouse where we ravishly ate our little Japanese tummies full-up. It was quite a once in a lifetime chance to meet our friends while IN Japan!!

The following day we spent in Osaka. We were able to see some old famous temples, and we went to see the city castle. As you can see in the picture, they didn't mess around when it came to castle building. The picture below is not the castle, but the huger than huge castle wall and moat.

And here is the castle! Huge isn't it! 8 floors! Obviously this is not the original; the Japanese had a thing about burning castles when they took over the city and it also was destroyed in WWII. But they fully restored it and what a sight! Inside is a museum of the castle history and artifacts from the castle and leaders of the clans that ruled it. It was quite interesting.

Of course, we went for the skyline view at the Floating Garden Observatory (not really a garden?). It was an interesting building and an amazing view! But we decided that we don't like Osaka very much :(. Sorry friends from Osaka...but that city is kind of dirty and crazily full of buildings. As you can see in the picture, as far as the eye can see are buildings, execpt of course the mountains. We felt that this town was more confusing than Tokyo, which is hard to believe.

The next day we visited Hiroshima. Now this city is very beautiful! It has many large parks, trees, an easy street car system, and of course many extremely famous places. Our first stop was the A-Bomb Dome. We don't think we can really explain this in words, but it was saddening and really touched the heart.

The Peace Park area has many many memorials and monuments dedicated to people who died in the bombing or gave their lives to helping the suffering people. The picture below is a monument to all those who died that infamous day. Under the dome is a grave with all the names of those who died. Beyond the dome is the eternal flame of peace that will be extinguished when all nuclear bombs have been destroyed. And just beyond that is the A-Bomb Dome, a standing reminder of the utter destruction of these bombs.

In the musuem are many artifacts, pictures, and stories of the destruction of that bombing. The stories are sickening and painful to read. The pictures below are a scale model of the city before and after the bombing. 140,000 people lost their lives from just this one bomb. It is interesting to note that today's hydrogen bomb is 1,000 times more powerful than the A-bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima.

In the evening of that day in Hiroshima, we went to visit Miyajima. This is one of the three most beautiful views of Japan, which means that we have seen two out of three of the best Japan views (check out our blog of our visit to Matsushima from our first year in Japan). Miyajima is an island which was held as sacred in the past. Nobody could step foot on the island so they built a temple on the beach on stilts. They had to reach the temple by going through a huge red tori (gate) in the water.

Now a days, it is more of a tourist trap, but it is still quite beautiful. The deer on the island are quite tame and even though you are not to feed or touch them, it is rather difficult to avoid a tame, hungry deer that can smell the food in your bag or that wants to take a bite of your shirt. Here is a picture of Angie trying to "avoid" one of these "pets."

And here is the beautiful view of the "floating" tori (its not really floating, but appears to be). It is really cool to see, but we found that God's creation around the island: mountains, sea, sunset, etc; were much more inspiring. We would have loved to take more pictures of this famous sight, but once the tide went out, people thought that it would be cooler to walk out under the tori to take pictures, which obviously ruined everybody else's pictures of the view.

We headed back to town, Miyajima is a ways out of town, and took one more walk by the A-Bomb dome and some of the other monuments. At night the dome has an eery green glow from the lighting that is visible only in pictures, which makes for a very beautiful scene.

Wednesday was Angie's 25th birthday!!!!!! So we celebrated American style with Starbucks for breakfast, Subway for lunch, and TGIFridays for dinner. We met up with our friend Saori in the afternoon to hang out. She took us on a boat cruise through Yokohama bay! Then we headed to TGIF for dinner. It has been Saori and our tradition to eat TGIF for our birthdays, but this time we ate ON Angie's birthday! We had a blast!!!

Final Conquerization

The weather was gorgeous on Sunday so we said, "Let's do it!" And we left to make our third and final hike up Mount Iwaki! We were planning to go earlier but the weather never turned out well, so we went for it, and it was a beautiful day to hike!! Our trip started with a 7am bus ride out to the base of the mountain. Our starting point was Iwaki Jinja, the mountain temple.



This is a picture from the bottom fo the mountain. This is what we hiked--3 times!!

Although only half way to the top, we were already tired and drenched in sweat!! Don't we look so excited to climb this mountain!

Using the sunglasses filter technique, we were able to get some pretty neat pictures!

Travis thought he spotted a full-on double rainbow, but it was just a bird!

We were nearing the top but even 3/4 the way up the views are already amazing!

The last trek is about 400 meters in length but it seems like 1,000 meters in height! What the picture below doesn't show is that there is another straight-up climb after this one! These last two vertigos are obviously the worst!!

We finally! reached the top!!! What a hike! We made it in a record time--about 3 hours 3o minutes! We were practically running up the mountain, but we made in alive! 3rd time's a charm.

Even though we were almost delirious from exhaustion, we were pretty happy with our conquerization! This mountain can't stop us--WOOT! Take that mountain!

The trek up was entirely too exhausting so after eating our PB&J's, Travis decided to take a short nap.

It was a pretty clear day so the views were quite marvelous! Here are some spectacular views from the top.

We took some time to hang out with the dragonflies that were zooming around the peak. There must have been hundreds of them, and some were the size of our hand. We stuck to the small ones!

We booked it down the mountain to catch the early bus back home, so by the end we looked more like zombies drenched in sweat!! So in our final conquering we hike from the bottom to the top and the top to the bottom, without cheating and taking the ski lift or the bus! But overall it was an amazing last journey to the top!!!! And we conquerized unscathed, besides a few scratches!

Final Nebuta

On Saturday we travelled to Aomori City, which is about an hour away, to watch our final Nebuta. This is quite similar to Hirosaki's Neputa, but much more up-beat and the floats are 3D instead of fan-shaped. So we left at 1:00pm and did some random shopping around town. We are super excited about the city's (as well as the whole Tsugaru area) new developments. As the Shinkansen (bullet train) will be coming to town in 115 days (they have a count down too!), they are preparing the city/area for its arrival. For example a new Mister Donut in the station, a coffee shop in the station, new bus platforms, new much nicer tourist office just outside the station, and a Nebuta Museum. Anyway, after doing some shopping Angie went to get her hair cut at our regular location.

After running our errands, we went to stake our spot for the festival. Fortunately, we had talked to a very nice man about the festival, so, to our dismay, we found that there was no parade tonight. They would only float the floats in the bay, which is the main reason we went. The very nice man also told us not to go to the regular location to view the floating floats but to a different location that would be much less crowded. So we headed there and found one spot left, luckily!


Well, that was at 5 and the parade didn't start till 7, but as the evening marched on, in marched the people to take hold of the positions they had laid claim to earlier.

So the parade started but we were a little disappointed because the floating floats did not come very close to shore, but stayed just beyond good picture taking distance. We attempted to snap a few but the quality was rather poor. As you can see in the picture, the floats were floated on barges while the people sang and played the common song.

A bit further offshore stood a cruise ship that went to sea just to view the floats. Wonder how much that spot costs and how early you have to claim it! Ours was free and we claimed it 2 hours before, but the floats didn't come 10 feet from us.

During the parade there was also a fireworks show. We didn't stay to watch the fireworks, but did get a few nice pictures of them! Although it wasn't the night we expected, we did see the floating Nebuta for the first and last time of our lives!

HSM Mania!

Yesterday we had a High School Musical marathon with two of our students. After seeing the first one at the English camp, they decided they wanted to watch all of them. So we took the whole afternoon to watch High School Musical 1, 2, and 3!


And it was a good idea to take the WHOLE afternoon because it was deathly hot! After watching the first one dripping with sweat because it was 97 degrees IN our apartment, we decided, for the first time in 2 1/2 years, to turn the AC on! Boy was that a wonderful idea, but now it will be difficult to refrain from using it, especially on deathly hot days like yesterday.

After watching the movies, Angie and Travis braved the heat of the evening to watch their final of all time Hirosaki Neputa. Tonight is the last night, but we will be venturing to a different city for their summer festival (stay tuned in). It was a joyous yet tear-jerking night of Neputa viewing as we realized our approaching return to America.

This is a panoramic from the night before when we returned from Goshogowara. The picture is not very good but the floats pass by the train station and we stood out on the second floor deck to watch!