Osorezan to Noheiji

We were up early (about 4:30) this morning, me to fix the bikes, Sumi to walk around the temple grounds once more before the service. I drew quite a crowd of interested workers, who were scrubbing the sulfur off the tiles near the lodging. Apparently, they'd never seen anyone change a tire before, They oohed and aahed as I pulled the wheels off, slid the tire and innertube off, etc.

The cooler morning air yielded a great deal of steam rising from the covered pools in the grounds.

Red pinwheels placed by people in remembrance of the deceased

Rather majestic looking main gate

Temple grounds are peaceful when not crawling with tourists

View from the main hall

In the corner of the temple grounds is a large Buddha. Coins left out were completely blackened from the sulfer

After all was set, we had a mandatory 6:30 service in the Jizou-den (Main hall). It was fascinating. This was the first service I've attended where they integrated taiko drums, chimes, bowls, and chanting. It was much closer to a performance piece than a service (the non-musical part was about 2 minutes of the head monk reading something). The service started with one monk ringing a bowl chime a number of times, then chiming once until it had almost stopped ringing, then hitting it again in the same pattern until the rest of the monks appeared. One monk sat by a bunch of instruments and would keep an insistent beat with the taiko, punctuating occasionally with a large bowl chime, all the while all of the monks (and some worshippers) would chant in a nasal style that blended together to create some overtones. As the chant continued, the beat would get faster, the chanting would get slightly higher, until the last words would slide down in pitch, indicating the end. This happened three times, with different chants, the entire service lasting about 15 minutes.

We then were allowed to walk back to the inner part of the temple (which we are normally not allowed to do) and see the carvings and idols contained therein. It was very interesting. After that, there was a second, smaller service in a side building in remembrance of the deceased (a recurring theme here, as this area represents the gates to the afterlife). It was similar, but shorter. A small plate of incense was passed among all the attendees, and we each added a small pinch of incense to the burning pile on the plate. This is when the praying to the dead occurs, I think. Anyway, fascinating stuff. I'm very glad we could take part.

After morning service was bath and breakfast. The bath was, like everything else, enormous, looking out into a rather desolate-looking scenery.

I was the only male in the lodge at the time, so bringing a camera in didn't seem weird

Even though we were the only people in the lodge, they gave an official announcement over the loudspeakers, as if it were full of people and they all needed reminding. Breakfast was in the same, large hall, and the same monk came and serenaded us with his pre-eating prayer, and we worked our way through a different set of vegetables and fruits

And finally, after much preparation, and a warning about being careful of the animals, like bears and the coming thunderstorms (which worried me more than the bears), we were off! 

The six Jizou outside the temple, each representing a different area of protection

Ready to roll! We couldn't ship our trailers from the temple (We were so remote, no one would come pick them up!). We stopped in Mutsu town at a konbini and shipped them.

Old-style bridge over the river flowing into Lake Usori.

The first half hour was spent climbing an incredibly steep rise (10-12% grade for about 600m). A lot of walking was done. After that, it was an exhilarating ride down the tree-covered mountain, stopping for a few pictures.

Gate announcing the entrance to Osorezan

A small stop at a mountain stream. The city added some bamboo pipes to create a natural drinking fountain. Very cold and very tasty!

Once we got out of the forest, the rest of the day was a very uninteresting ride through various small towns on the main highway. There is only one road that connects the peninsula we started on and the rest of the mainland, so every car or truck traveling between the cities was on this road. It was loud, a little dirty, and nothing like the morning ride. We were quite glad to reach our next hotel, which turned out to be another enormous resort with almost no one staying at it (we are in off-season right now). Thankfully, there WERE other guests this time.

The Makodo Sightseeing Resort Hotel is a huge hotel set up for skiing season. It is a bit luxurious. It is a bit expensive. It is in the middle of nowhere. We decided to eat dinner here, rather than our usual feast of trail mix, bananas, and apple juice. I don't yet know how much we just spent on food. I don't think I want to look at the receipt when we check out. It was easily as much as several nights in a hotel. But it was quite an experience! I let them know I couldn't eat fish, and the chef apparently took it as a personal challenge. It started out as a nice, simple six-course meal...

Simple?

With various pork, chicken, and beef dishes. The oil in the center is for shabu-shabu, a cooking style similar to fondue, where you add the vegetables, then the thinly-sliced meat and then (according to our waitress) you "shabu", which we gathered meant boil the meat in the oil and eat it. We were apparently too slow for her, because after a few minutes, she came in and added my vegetables for me. We were pleasantly surprised that there was (almost) no fish in this meal. Apparently, Japanese people think if it is dried, ground up fish, it doesn't count as fish. The chicken and rice dish was heavily seasoned with Bonito flakes.

As we were working our way through the food, the waitress kept bringing out more and more dishes. I swear the chef made every dish he knew how that did not have fish in it.

Misoto beef tongue. Miso-flavored sauce.

"Hamburg", but it wasn't a hamburger. It was ground beef patty with carrots and some other vegetable we had last night mixed in. Good seasoning and quite tasty.

Beef stew in a tomato-based sauce

Salisbury steak with vegetables. 

At this point we were laughing every time she brought a new set of dishes. We didn't know if it was OK to get up and leave, because as soon as we were close to finishing, she brought something else.

The final dish (she told us so), a coffee-flavored Jell-o type thing. Sumi was in heaven, and ate both of them.

After nine courses, we finally waddled back to our room. I got caught up with blog entries (we had no Internet at Osorezan) and Sumi, who had not slept well yet this trip, passed out. There is some heavy rain and possible thunderstorms in the forecast, so we're going to have to play the next few days by ear. Rain we're fine with, as we have rain gear, but thunderstorms could be a problem. Tomorrow, we'll be planning on heading into Aomori, the capital city of this prefecture. Sumi has concocted an evil scheme to have climb another mountain, rather than ride along the main highway again. Her reasoning, which I cannot fault, is that if we get stuck in the rain, it's better to be alone on a deserted mountain road stuck in the rain than being repeatedly splashed by passing trucks and cars. It's a good thing we don't have our trailers.

Up to Osorezan

This morning was spent with largely uneventful travel. We hopped on the Shinkansen at 6:30am and headed north up to Hachinohe, where we transferred to a local ワンマン車 (One man train) and trundled our way up to Shimokita, where we could catch a bus to Osorezan. We arrived right around 11am, when the bus was leaving, and decided to wait and get some food (we hadn't eaten yet today) and catch the next bus at 2pm.

Shimokita Station. Nice, rural, and a PokéGym

Sumi captured a gym with mere minutes to go before boarding the bus.

We ate at a Cafe Gusto, a chain family restaurant here. Our other options included McDonalds, KFC, Pizza Hut (I'm not kidding), and a few local spots of questionable quality. Gusto was fine, their pasta was not bad (Spaghetti with eggplant and spinach). We also stopped at an electronics store (Sumi is determined to find a Switch now) and picked up some cases for our gear.

The bus ride to Osorezan gave us a preview of the mountain we'll be bike across (both up and down) tomorrow morning. When we arrived at the temple, we discovered we were the only guests. In a resort-like onsen hotel that can hold hundreds. Also, our bikes hadn't arrived yet. As there was still an hour left in their delivery window we only kind of panicked (it's hard to go on a bike trip without your bikes...). We took the time to walk the temple grounds.

We were immediately struck by the contrast in landscape. Osorezan is a thousand year old temple built in a valley, on top of an active volcano surrounded on all sides be 8 mountain peaks and containing a sulfurous lake, a white sand beach, 108 pools of boiling mud, and a bunch of lava rock. The area was chosen by this sect of Buddhism because it rather closely mirrored their vision of the gates of Hell. The air in the entire area is heavy with sulfur that rises out of the mud pools continuously. The ground water here is so acidic, you are advised not to get any on your face or in your hair.

But it was beautiful, in a barren, desolate kind of way.

Each rock pile is covering a mud pool, so the unwary don't fall in. Boiling mud is hot. Notice the nice, green tree covered mountains in the background. The volcanic activity is contained to this small area directly around the temple.

Yellow and red sulfur deposits are everywhere.

There are many impressive statues on the temple grounds. All must be cleaned regularly, otherwise the sulfur will corrode all of the metal and discolor the stone with red, white, or yellow deposits.

Many Jizou were also present.

In the center of the "Blood Pond" (the area around is standing water with a deep red color.)

A small pool in the middle of the white sands. Brilliant green coloring.

Lake Usori. Beautiful, but too acidic to house life, other than smaller organisms

The newest statue of the temple, constructed in 2011 for the victims of the "great earthquake" and resulting tsunami that hit Touhoku.

There are some creatures that manage to live in this area, including a まむし, which is either a broiled eel or a pit viper. As the sign says "Beware, Mamushi", I'm leaning towards pit viper. We didn't see him.

There were a number of living things in the area, including the above-mentioned pit viper, a ton of せみ, or locusts, ravens, and others. The locusts were huge, and very loud. They made sounds akin to what a frog or bird may make. This disturbed Sumi. She reported that one of them "spoke to her", and that insects were not supposed to makes noises like that.

After checking out the area, we headed back to the temple lodging, where out bikes had, thankfully, been delivered. After putting the together, we noticed that Sumi's front and my rear tire had leaks at the stems of the tubes. This was bad, since I'm not good enough to repair stems. I left changing the tubes until tomorrow morning, and we went in for a shower before dinner.

I mentioned that the lodge was built for hundreds. It was huge, made even more big by the fact that we were the only guests. One of the priests sang an opening and closing prayer for us (serenaded us, really), for the meal.

This was the front lobby. The ceilings were over 20' high, and every room was enormous. Our room could easily have slept 10 people. It was a three room apartment.

The dining hall. We felt kind of silly having a meal all prepared and served for just us in here. A small plaque indicated the meal was for Joounuzu-san...in case they got confused as to which guests this was for....

Shoujun ryouri, or Buddhist cooking, is all vegetarian. It's one of the only types of food here that I can just experiment and try without worrying about hidden fish seasoning.

After all was said and done, we were exhausted. I passed out almost immediately, expecting to be up early to fix the bikes, attend a Buddhist ceremony, and start out bike trip, finally!

Pocky has some unfortunate new branding for their treats. Sukky speaks for itself. Men's Pocky got an overhaul and is now Pocky-Adult Milk. That's not much better. Lovecky is just...no.

Errands and Fun in Tokyo

Today was a day of visiting old haunts and running errands. We have a day to burn while our gear gets shipped up to Osorezan, so we're stuck in Tokyo (oh darn!). We walked over to Ueno Station for some baked goods

New storefront, same great pastries

then walked down to Akihabara to look for various things. We were contemplating getting the new Nintendo Switch, only to find out that they are rather in demand at the moment, and sold out everywhere. Oh, well. I did pick up a used Vita game at Traders 2 (great used store just off the main drag), since they aren't really shipped to the US much anymore.

We stopped at Yodobashi Camera to look for the Switch, and found a bunch of other things, instead

That's a "life-sized" lego R2-D2, and a ton of Storm Troopers in the back

We also found a very well stocked cycling section in Yodobashi, and were able to pick up a travel pump and some new gloves for Sumi. Yodobashi is a great store. We also did some window shopping at a few other places. Sumi was impressed with the Pokémon selections

Jon warned me, and it is true: Hobby Off Akiba has closed. Well, moved, but the Akihabara location is no more. Looks like they are doing something with the whole building. When we get back to Tokyo next week, one of my missions will be to find the new location.

The rest of the day was spent getting some lunch at the world's best Indian restaurant outside of India, Rasoi, and getting everything ready for the real start of the trip tomorrow: the JR Passes, Shinkansen tickets, breakfast for tomorrow (the train leaves at 6:30am), laundry, finishing work (I'm done! Sumi is less done), and packing.

On our way back from Rasoi, we stopped at Tokyo Station, where Sumi had read about a place called Character Street, where there were a ton of, essentially, cute crap for sale.

The sign above reads "Tokyo Character Street"

There were a great many shops with stuffed animals, etc, for sale. Sumi was in heaven, I could barely fit in the stores.

There was another competing side "street" dedicated to Gashapon, which are little vending machines filled with plastic capsules containing some toy, trinket, or other collectible of a given brand. They are insanely popular here.

We did not partake.

Back in Asakusa, while I did the laundry and finished the semester grading, Sumi took a short Pokéwalk to Sensouji temple. It was quite crowded with tourists, as usual, but also people in festival attire (kimono, happi, etc) for some kind of performance.

Restoration and construction finished, looking very nice.

A beautiful day to be out walking.

Not a very exciting day, but it's great to be back in Japan! I'll leave you with the Bic Camera website's response when we attempted to order a Switch from them online, just to see what would happen. This happened:

Payment amount of money of the moon?

The Force was with us...

After a ridiculously busy week, capped by a ridiculously busy day, Sumi and I found ourselves in a hotel room in Chicago waiting to get on the plane to Japan. I had flown back from New York this morning, stopped at work on my way back home, then sat in Memorial Day weekend traffic and crawled home, where the cleaning and packing resumed until it was 7pm, and we had to get going, With a quick goodbye to the cats, we were on the road.

A welcome, uneventful drive later, we were checked in and ready to pass out, which occurred promptly. Our flight wasn't until 5:30 the next evening, so we spent the following morning in the breakfast area (all you can eat make-your-own-waffles!) working and I managed to finish most of my grading (!) before we had to catch the shuttle.

At the airport, we got checked in and still had some time, so we grabbed a sandwich at one of the pubs in gate area and had to listen to some loud person brag to his friends about drinking, Las Vegas, drinking, famous people he says he knew, drinking. I didn't like hm very much. But I did finish all of my grading and Sumi got some work done, as well, so we're about 95% on vacation!

So, ANA has themed planes. Since 1998, they've had numerous Pokémon planes (though they were largely domestic, flights, so we never flew on one).

Well, they have a new theme going now: Star Wars. We flew on one of the BB-8 themed planes.

There are also R2-D2 and C-3PO themed ones

This was on the back of every seat

There was also a big, stuffed Yoda greeting us as we walked in. We couldn't get a picture without holding up the boarding process, which would not have gone over well. The flight was also uneventful, and 13 hours later, we landed in Haneda for the first time. It is a much smaller airport, which was great, in that there was almost no crowd. Immigration took about 2 minutes, customs about 1. A few train rides and a walk and we were back at hotel Toukaisou in Asakusa! We shipped out bikes up to our starting point for this trip, the temple at Osorezan, so we have a few days before it will arrive. Not sure what I'll do with the bonus day in Tokyo.

Sumi has a plan already:

It is like this in every direction.

2017 - Touhoku Or Bust!

Well, it's that time of year again! We will once again be trundling off to Japan. This year will be another cycling trip, starting at the northern edge of the Touhoku region and biking down to Sendai over the course of a few weeks.

This year's preparations have been...a challenge. We got our bikes out just a handful of times, between bad weather and some insane scheduling, on my part, so it will be a slow, and probably painful, start, but we'll be on vacation, so all will be good.

Speaking of scheduling, The Rush Tribute Project was hired rather last minute to do a pair of shows in Long Island. As in New York. So, this week has been a blur (and it's only Tuesday!). I flew into NYC today, met with the venue to coordinate our setup and performance details. We play tomorrow and Thursday. I fly back home Friday to finish up with work. We head down to Chicago Friday night and fly out Saturday...

But, I'm packed, Sumi has several days to pack, the bikes are in their cases, ready to go, and in five days, we'll be in Japan!

On a side note. Tonight, I am staying at the The Local NYC hostel in Long Island City, which would usually scare me. But it was very well reviewed on Booking.com, and after checking in, I can see why. Nice, clean and spacious common area complete with full service coffee and liquor bar (neither of which appeal to me, but a nice feature and good atmosphere), full kitchen, laundry and work area with computers, and fast Wi-Fi. The rooms are clean and well-apportioned and the staff is very pleasant. I chose the 6-person co-ed dormitory room, because it was the cheapest option ($50/night). Each person gets their own locker to store their belongings and there are outlets EVERYWHERE. This is truly a modern hostel. Unless something happens overnight (which I doubt), I would highly recommend The Local as a place for solo travelers or people traveling on the cheap in NYC.