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.

A Little More of Matsumoto and Back to Asakusa!

Our train for Tokyo didn't depart until 11:00, so we had some time to kill in the morning. We decided to check out one of the nearby shrines, again on the recommendation of the woman at the front desk, and a "famous" well. More on that later. First, Yohashira Shrine:

Outside of the shrine. Nice.

Inner shrine. Note the nice taiko drum.

On the way to the "famous" well, we spotted an interesting work of "art" (I'm using a lot of air quotes in this post) next to a police box.

I'll let you come up with your own caption

So, the well that we were told was famous was certainly nice.

It has its own gazebo and wind socks

And the water was fresh and cold.

People were filling up liter bottles while we were here

But I'm not sure how it's any better than any of the other wells in the city. It is the well used in the Matsumoto city tourism guide, so maybe that's why it's "famous". There are over 20 other wells dotting the city.

Anyway, after that we headed to the station, passing one of the more "impressive" bike shops we'd seen in Japan.

They probably have anything you'd want, but finding it...

The rest of the day was fairly predictable. We boarded the train to Nagano, transferred to the Shinkansen to Ueno, took the Yamanote to Meguro and had Indian food at Rasoi, went to Akihabara to shop, ate some crepes

and noticed Baskin-Robbin's was making inroads in the Japanese market (along with Wendy's and Burger King. We only export the best to other countries)

Baskin Robbin's assimilated well.

Friday was more of the same. Meiji Jingu, Ikebukuro, Ueno. Many of our old favorites. I'll leave you with some of the more amusing pics we came up with.

Nyanko-sensei jambouree

Andersen Bakery Panda Buns. The Panda is Ueno's mascot.

Panda reading a book.

Sanrio characters get serious in a race to determine the most popular one.

Wired Cafe's newest parfait creations. We had to walk an extra mile before eating these.

Some random display of stuffed animals in a store window.

Tomorrow (Saturday), we are going to take a day trip down to Kamakura to visit the Daibutsu, which we haven't seen since 2009, and some of the other attractions in a city full of temples and shrines.

Packing up and Heading to Matsumoto

With the promise of a breakfast afterwards, we were up early to pack up all of our biking gear, then head outside to take apart our trusty bikes and get them ready to be sent on to the airport. Sumi's pedals managed to get very cross-threaded, and she wasn't able to get them off, so I gave it a go. How hard was it?

I broke a stainless steel wrench trying to get them off.

After nearly 40 minutes of fighting with them, I finally managed to remove both pedals. We'll see whether just the pedals or the whole assembly needs replacing when we get home. For now, though we were packed and ready to eat.

Bacon and eggs? Sure, why not!

After a wonderful breakfast, we were driven to the "station". It was an unmanned set of two platforms (one for each direction). The trail to the platform was barely more than an indentation in a bunch of weeds.

Yanaba! Yanaba desu!

Staring off in contemplative wonder...

All the trains in and out of Yanaba were "Wanman", or one man trains.

Aforementioned one man train.

The ride into Matsumoto was uneventful. Once there, we headed to the Circle K convenience store across the street from the station and shipped off everything but what we could fit in our backpacks to Narita to await our flight on Monday. We hand several hours before we could check in to our hotel, so we took a walk down to Matsumoto Castle, one of the three major castles in Japan (the others being Himeji and Osaka). It was huge.

Very impressive main castle with two annex buildings

There were people dressed in "period costumes".
Clearly not a real ninja. We saw him.

She was trapped posing for a bunch of creepy old men with very large cameras. And Sumi.

Yukimura Sanada returns to battle!

The inside of the castle was quite interesting, but un-photogenic. There were many novel approaches to constructing the tower, including a "hidden" floor that was used for storage and a bunch of very large beams supporting multiple floors.

After the castle, we still had some time, so (pun intended), we headed to the Timepiece museum. Yup, a museum of clocks. I like clocks. The whole front of the museum was the largest grandfather clock in Japan.

Now THAT'S a clock!

Inside, I geeked out at all the cool old and interesting timepieces. Sumi sportingly tagged along. I won't bore you with details, but I will bore you with a few pics.

19th century marine chronometer

Edo period (1603-1868) alarm clock

A chandelier clock, so people dining could just look up and see the time.

We were finally able to get into our hotel, so we got settled and asked about coin laundry (our first time in a city in some time, we were on our last set of clean clothes). The closest one was a 15 minute bike ride away. Well, we just packed up our bikes and sent them away. "Fortunately", they had some bikes they loaned to guests, so we hopped on the Japanese mamachari bikes and trundled off to the laundromat.

Pretty sweet rides.

In a word, they were short. I pulled the seat up as far as it could go without falling out, and I looked like I was on a child's bike. It must've looked pretty comical. It was also heavy and not easy to pedal, steer or stop. But beggars can't be choosers, and they got us there and back, with all our laundry.

The woman at the front desk also advised us to see the castle at night, when they light it up. That meant we had to stay awake until dark (~8:00pm). So, we got some dinner at a newly opened restaurant called Hokkaido Bang! Bang! It was a pizza parlor that also had all-you-can-drink specials on beer, wine and soda. And wonderful seasoned popcorn. The pizza was good ingredients on cardboard. They do not like to taste their pizza crust in Japan, apparently, so they make it a few molecules thick, I honestly don't think they use yeast.

There was some cheese, and oregano and garlic and something else. Whatever, it rocked.

Very good salads

And pizza on cardboard. The edge of the crust was tasty, though.

We went back to the hotel and got some work done in the lobby until it was dark enough, then headed to the castle.

It was worth coming back at night

A nice end to our first day as "normal" tourists. Tomorrow we head back to Tokyo for a few days of souvenir shopping, eating and maybe a day trip or two.