Volunteer Weekend and Fun with 'Mac!

5/13/2017

The weekend after I got back from my vacation with Tye, A couple of my friends from Fukushima City came to town to help out with the Odaka Volunteering day that month. It was raining cats and dogs all day! The rain was relentless and there was no respite from it. We all wore plastic ponchos to try and keep ourselves dry, although it didn’t work for most of us.

On that day we helped clear land on an old woman’s property. She was so sweet and nice, she brought out snacks and tea for us to eat and drink while we were clearing her lawn. We didn’t really do all that much, but you could tell that she was grateful for it all the same. We only cut her overgrown grass and cut down two flowering trees that she didn’t want anymore. We then cleared all the grass and put them into piles so that people could gather it and dispose of it the next day.

Before and after to the left.

Before and after to the right.

We still had time until our volunteering ended, so we continued onto a nearby cemetery and started cutting down trees that the city wanted gone. I once again was able to cut trees apart with a hand saw. I find this activity really fun. It makes me feel tough!

Olga caught a frog at nearly ever volunteering event!

While cleaning up the cemetery we found this snake in a bush!

I didn’t take any pictures that day because I didn’t want to risk damaging my phone with the relentless rain. But at the end of the day we did take one group photo, and I later received some photos from my friends who did take pictures. I was a mess. I was soaked through from the rain and grass, and I was dirty from stomping around in the mud all day and hauling trees and logs to and fro.

But then ‘Mac surprised me with a big muddy hand print across my face! I wore it with pride and took my one and only photograph of the day.

5/14/2017

The next day Cormac, Felipe and I went back to Fukushima City and went to a soccer game. We watched a match between Fukushima United and the Akita Blue Thunder (or something like that.)  It was fun to see so many of my friends and to hang out with everyone, but the game itself was pretty boring.

Here is a photograph of all of us having fun.

After the game ended people started dispersing and going out to dinner and stuff, but I went back home to Minamisoma for… reasons. Sadly it ended up being an early night for me.

Adventures with Tye!: Day 12 & 13 - Driving back through Shikoku and Honshu.

5/10/2017 - Day 12

That morning we woke up bright and early even though we were exhausted. Today was not going to be an amazingly fun day, we had a lot of driving to do and a lot of ground to cover.

The plan was to drive through Kagawa and stop at the Sumoto Castle on Awaji Island in Hyogo Prefecture on our way out of Shikoku, and then drive to Nagano where we had booked a hotel.

Tye was in charge of navigating, so when we left Ehime prefecture on the highway, there was a fork in the route. I had told Tye that I wanted to drive through Kagawa prefecture, but I don’t know if I made myself clear, because when we had to choose which direction of the fork we would take, Tye chose the other route. It drove along the south side of the border through Tokushima prefecture and missed Kagawa entirely, but he chose it because it was faster (by seven minutes.)

A half hour later I asked when we could expect to cross into Kagawa Prefecture and Tye told me that we wouldn’t, that he had chosen the faster route. I was a bit heartbroken and sad. Even though I wasn’t going to be able to do anything in Kagawa, I had at least wanted to see the scenery and drive through it.

I was really sad, and Tye didn’t quite understand why I was so sad, probably because I had not adequately explained my desires. So when I was finally able to articulate that I was sad because I wanted to see Kagawa, he took my phone and planned a new route.

He found a Buddhist temple in the corner of Kagawa Prefecture before you go back into Tokushima. It was about a forty five minute drive out of our way, but he wanted me to be happy, so he insisted we go see this temple in Kagawa.

When we arrived and I took a look at where we were, I realized that we were at Buddhist temple #88 on the Shikoku Temple Pilgrimage, Okubou-ji, The final stop!

There were a couple of relatively large temple buildings on the temple grounds. There were also many different types of statues all around.

These were the cool looking komainu.

There were these statues that were displayed like the Jizo pyramids, but they looked so different from traditional Japanese statues, that I am still confused about who they are supposed to be.

This guy looks Gaelic.

There were also a few beautiful Wisteria “roofs” around

the temple grounds. There were two colors of wisteria, the normal purple and a yellow-ish white. They were climbing up wires that were stretched in a roof-like structure above the pathways.

Next to one of the temples, there is a large, square, glass building that is full of long, narrow pieces of wood. These are walking sticks from people who have completed the 88 temple pilgrimage. Once they finish, they give their walking sticks to the monks of this temple where they are blessed and dedicated to the temple. I thought this was a neat thing to do. It was impressive to see so many walking sticks, to see the representation of so many people having completed the pilgrimage. The glass building was not completely full, but it was starting to get close.

You could turn the corner and walk down to another level of the hill. I saw a set of doors that were set into the hill that were closed and locked. Looking at the hill as a whole, this would have lead into a room underneath the glass building and temple next to it. There was a sign out front that said you could go into this underground room for 500 yen if you notified one of the monks who could unlock it for you. We didn’t have a whole lot of time, so we decided we didn’t need to go in, but I suspect that it was yet another underground cave full of Buddha statues.

We walked around for a few minutes longer looking at the temple and the shrines around the grounds.  

After we left we drove through Kagawa for a short time before we passed into Tokushima Prefecture again and hopped on the express way. Kagawa was so pretty and green!

We were not on the express way for too long, because we decided to stop for lunch at a delicious seafood restaurant. They mostly sold sushi, but there were other things there as well such as seafood rice bowls and a wide variety of sashimi plates. When we arrived, even though I spoke Japanese to the host, they assigned us a waitress that spoke English. She was very nice, and Tye was grateful to have her.

The food was so fresh and delicious! I had a unagi rice bowl and Tye had one of the sashimi plates with many different types of fish on it. We also got a delicious egg pudding with little bits of mushroom and shrimp mixed in. I don’t know what you call this food, but it looked like this.

You can see my egg "pudding" in the top right corner of the tray. Unagi bowl.

Udon and sashimi. The egg "pudding" is covered at the bottom center of this photo.

After we finished we drove across town to Sumoto Castle. This place is interesting because I would say it is more of a ruin than it is a castle. You can see the remnants of many castle walls and this place used to be a reasonable size, still much smaller than Tsuruga-jo in Fukushima or Matsuyama Castle in Ehime, but it was still rather sizable. We didn’t see a castle anywhere, although we saw the tall walls that are at the base of the castles.

We kept walking around looking for the castle until we turned a corner and then saw it. It is such a small castle! It looks like this small tower was rebuilt in the recent past and it is meant to be a small representation or place holder of the castle as a whole.

You can walk right up underneath of it and look up into the building. It is empty except for some staircases climbing up the few floors it has. It used to have a staircase from underneath the castle to up inside it, but it looks like it was removed. Either way, you cannot go inside the castle, only walk around underneath of it and around it.

The roof of the castle has these really cool demon faces decorating the roof ridgepoles.

Even though the castle wasn’t much to look at, the view from the grounds was breathtaking!

You could look down off the mountain and see this beautiful town to the left and the open ocean to the right. I could have stayed there all day staring out at that beautiful view.

The zoom on Tye's camera is amazing!

It was already past 1 p.m. at this point and we needed to be on our way. We returned to the car and hopped back on the expressway through Awaji Island, up through Hyogo, Osaka, Kyoto, Shiga, Gifu, Aichi, and Nagano Prefectures. That day we did around ten hours of driving and covered nearly 450 miles!

The hotel we stayed at was a nice little hotel right next to Lake Suwa in Nagano Prefecture.

We were both exhausted from the great distances of driving, so we retired as soon as we could, which was just before midnight. 

5/11/2017 - Day 13

The next morning we woke up pretty early, we wanted to sleep in, but I had to get Tye to a train station so he could get back to Narita Airport and by extension his plane, on time. So we woke up, got our shit together, and ate a nice breakfast of granola, yogurt and fruit. 

We ate breakfast while looking out the window over the beautiful lake. The sun was shining, and there were some rain clouds on the horizon, and a medium wind was blowing, but it was still a beautiful sight. I don't know why I didn't think to take any pictures of the view. After we finished eating we hit the road.

Tye could only take trains on the JR East rail lines, so we found that Takasaki Station in Gunma Prefecture was a good place for us to part ways. It took us nearly two hours to drive there from Suwa, Nagano.

Once we got to the station, I parked the car and walked Tye to the shinkansen ticket gates. We said our tearful goodbyes, and Tye hopped on a shinkansen to Narita Airport, and I got back in my car and drove back to Minamisoma, Fukushima.

It took me over four hours to make it back to Fukushima. I drove through Gunma, Tochigi and Ibaraki Prefectures before I made it to Fukushima Prefecture, and then I had to drive to the north east of the prefecture. I was so dead by the time I got home. I put on a movie and did some cross stitching for a few hours until it was close enough to a reasonable bed time that I finally let myself go to sleep.

I did have work the next morning, and I was exhausted, but I had a wonderful vacation with Tye. We saw so many new and wonderful things, and I don’t regret a single minute of my trip!