Niigata Sake no Jin: Day 2

3/12/17
The next morning we woke up and had a nice breakfast from the ryokan. I felt great! I got enough sleep and I was no worse for wear. It was amazing!

This was the koi pond in the little garden at the ryokan.

And here are some lovely decorations from the front of the ryokan.

We still had the rest of the day, and no plans so I suggested going to Niigata city and checking out the Minato-Inari shrine with the spinning komainu statues (see my Niigata Road Trip posts for more info.) My friends had never seen it, so I thought it would be nice to go show them.

We drove the hour back into the city and I told them about the site. It was a weird feeling being the person who knew things. This time I was the tour guide! While we were there I saw a few things that I hadn’t noticed before. This lovely rock was at one end of the shrine, and I thought it was really pretty, so I took a picture. It looks like marbled meat.

I also saw this old statue that had been badly weathered over time. There was a little metal woman statue on top, but I couldn’t get a good picture. Luckily my friends helped me out:

Here is Felipe doing his best impersonation of the derpy kitsune statues:

From there we still had plenty of time so I suggested going to the Northern History Museum outside Niigata City (once again, see my Niigata vacation posts for more info.)

A Bromance to be envious of...

Once again we saw the beautiful gardens and the many tea houses scattered around the grounds. We walked through the big house and the barns where they kept the various farming equipment.

Old-timey card game!

It was really fun explaining all I had learned the last time I was there. And seeing everything a second time helped me remember things I probably would have forgotten.

Here’s my gang!

This time we received an English language pamphlet that told us a little bit about things to look out for around the site. On the pamphlet it mentioned the “Power stones.” They are a few stones around the gardens from which people “feel power.” This is how Cormac felt as he found one:

After that we walked around the small neighborhood on our way back to the car, we found a small park,

and a shrine on a corner which had some Jizo-sama statues inside. It also had some incense and candles inside that you could use to pray for the souls of children (that is the purpose of that particular shrine, I think)

We also went to see this Buddhist temple. It was just as pretty as I remembered it. Then we piled back into the car and drove back to Fukushima City where we played Frisbee in a parking lot. After we were done with that tom-foolery went our separate ways. I then drove the long road back to Minamisoma.