We had a delightful if uneventful weekend. These chilly winter nights (and days!), combined with the recent rain. have made the idea of motorbiking or camping or doing much of anything less than attractive.
This weekend we mostly stayed home, working on house tasks and personal fun-projects (me on digital scrapbook pages, Brian on beer-brewing and digital book production). We took a break from staying indoors to go out for dinner at Tori-Ichi, our favourite local yakitori (grilled stuff on skewers) restaurant, and to go for a decent run this morning, but otherwise, it was a quiet, house-bound weekend.
For last week’s business trip, I took the shinkansen (bullet train) which passes through Fuji city, an industrial town known for its paper mill. As the train slowed to make its stop at Shin-Fuji station, I shot a couple of photos of the city’s industry, with the beautiful Mt. Fuji in the background.
I sepia toned and adjusted this shot in Lightroom:
I’m away on business again this week, and this time far far from any big city. I’m in the small town of Daito, not even on a train line, and I love it.
Rather than big, chain business hotels, I am staying in a small, local minshuku called Fukuda. Minshuku are Japanese Bed and Breakfast type hotels – very cozy and comfortable, with great dinners and breakfasts on offer – and the Fukuda is especially nice:
This took a while to get together finally upload, but here is a short (8 minute) video of the riding through Cambodia… The camera was a gift (Thanks dad and Eileen!), but I was too worried about its durability during the early more rugged portions of the journey, so my footage was on the smoother later sections. Most of the roads we took were really hellish, but exhilarating. It turns out that the camera held on to my helmet and worked fine in every condition, so I missed catching a lot of the journey. I hope to try again someday!
It was a sunny but chilly day, with the high being about 7 Celsius. However, not wanting to hibernate for another weekend, we went for a 10km morning jog, then spent the afternoon shopping at the Gotemba Supremium Outlet Mall.
I’ve mentioned this mall before – a large, sprawling outlet nestled at the foot of Mt. Fuji, about 30 minutes from home, it is rather a tourist attraction and people come from Tokyo and further to shop there, yet we mostly take it for granted. However, Brian’s need for shoes, and my enjoyment of even just window shopping, decided that we’d spend our day in the chilly air of Gotemba.
We shopped for about four hours, including a late-lunch break, and came out with four pairs of shoes (three for Brian, one for me), two large bags of Salt and Vinegar chips (for me), a few little impulse purchases, and a couple of photos of my favourite mountain.
Early Evening at the Outlet Mall
By the time we got back to the car, it had been dark for over an hour and dinner time had come, so we stopped at a new izakaya on the way home. Good food, friendly service – we’d go there again!
As today is Setusbun, we had a little fun at lunch time at the office throwing beans at the demons.
Always falling on February 3rd (or occasionally 4th), marking the day before spring, Setsubun is not a holiday, but is just a day when kids and even adults do mame-maki – bean throwing ceremony. While throwing the beans, we shout, *oni wa soto, fuku wa uchi*, which means *demons out, happiness in!”.
I, who have been chasing away my demons for ages, was only too happy to grab some beans and fling them at the symbolic devils (embodied by some co-workers).
We also ate some makizushi while facing the ‘good luck’ direction, which is west-south-west this year.
We received the results of our Nihongo Shiken – the test we wrote in December. And, as we had pretty much expected, neither of us passed.
We are not crushed by any means – we are merely resolved to actually study for the next test, which will be in July.
The JLPT is actually changing a little in July as a new level will be added, called N3. Previously (as when we wrote the test in December), there were four levels – 1 through 4, with four being the easiest and one the toughest. However, there is a large gap between levels three and two, so in this new structure, the N3 is meant to bridge that gap.
Once again, in order to procrastinate projects in progress, I’ve been playing with a new (for me) website called Shuttercal. Actually, I found this website and created an account ages ago, then promptly forgot about it until I came across it again. It’s a site that is meant for you to upload a photo a day, and the layout is calendar style. It looks quite nice, is free, and easy. I haven’t fully explored it yet, but I spent some time uploading photos for January. I did cheat a bit and upload some scrapbook pages, and, since their creation spanned several days, I put them up in multiple copies!
One good aspect, for those of us who multi-task, is that you can embed photos from the calendar into your blog, so no need to upload a second time if you don’t want to.
After my very relaxing Saturday, we spent Sunday mostly lazing around and working on photo/video projects. But in the afternoon, I decided to go to a small New Year’s Party that I’d heard about which was organized by MIRA, the Mishima International Relations Association.
While I don’t usually participate in any kind of “international” event, I needed to at least warm up my motorcycle engine, and I thought that this would be a good way to meet new people and network a little. So at 1:30 I got on my motorcycle and rode to Mishima.
The party was held in a event hall in a hotel, and I was pleasantly surprised! It was quite a nice party, with a lovely setup, and a wide variety of people from all around the world. I met people from Columbia, Peru, and Iran as well as a few Canadians and Australians.
They even had a cool opening band:
All in all, a nice way to spend a couple of hours on a Sunday afternoon.
Yesterday (Friday) marked my 38th birthday. Since my birthday fell on a Friday, I decided to ‘celebrate’ by taking the day off and savouring some ‘me time’, which was wonderful. We then decided to have a quiet evening of pizza and a DVD, saving the real outing for today, when we did one of my favourite things – spending the day at a nice onsen (spa)!
We stayed close to home and went to Cha-me-no-Yu, part of the Gotemba Kogen resort. We arrived there at about 10:30 a.m. Upon arrival and ‘check in’, we were given a yukata set that we would then spend the day wearing around the buildings whenever we were not nakedly bathing in the big, deep, hot baths.
We spent the entire day there, having lunch at the Cha-me-no-Yu restaurant. When taking breaks from the bath, we just relaxed – swinging in hammocks, swinging in swings, sitting in massage chairs, or napping out in the nap room:
In an outdoor hammock after a bath
It's common to put your little towel on your head in an onsen
Afternoon nap in the 'Relax Room'
While Brian merely rested his eyes a little, I totally fell asleep on the heated pad while listening to an audio book on my iPod. When I finally woke up, we took yet another bath before calling it a day and heading home.
