Sauntering Sunflower

So, I just sat down to review my photos of the last few days. The good news is that there were a lot. The bad news is that there weren’t a lot. What kind of story do they tell?

Okay. Fun story. It turns out upon further inspection that the map to the Gekkeikan brewery museum was truncated by about 10 km. Our 1:45 hours of walking only got us halfway before we gave up and found a trainstation back to Kyoto. But it was a good half, wandering minami Kyoto in the sunshine and searching for a vending machine that would sell pineapple soda.

Near misses would be the theme of our day, as we later were within a block of the hotel we wanted to stay at, but were unable to discover the secret alley hidden in the back of the old wardrobe that led to the magical Super Hotel Kyoto.

After tramping all the way back to Kyoto station, we visited the tourist information center and got slightly better directions, which may or may not have involved a secret handshake, a snow monkey with a scottish brogue, and discovering that the true meaning of Christmas was in our hearts all along.

If only we knew.

Remember that One Piece promotion? C’mon, it was like three posts back. Anyway, the promotion is already over. It lasted less than a week. We got 5/9 posters. Because back home, promotions last longer than 5 days. We figured we had time.

We haven’t given up hope yet about finding the rest of the wanted posters, but the prospects are rather dim. Fortunately, we nabbed all the posters we really liked. The rest were simply for completeness.

In that similar vein, McDonalds is running a promotion featuring American Burgers. They have a burger named for every state and each burger gets one week. That’s it. Then it’s gone. They’ve already gone through Texas and New York while we were here, and they are halfway through Hawaii now. It’s insane!

We zipped out to Nagoya in the Mie prefecture, with the intent of spending considerable time in that region. The city featured a few interesting buildings and lots of traffic, but we didn’t feel any particular charm.

Our plan was to crash for a night in Nagoya, then head up to Gero Onsen for a relaxing night or two. We booked into the Dormy Inn Nagoya, which was decidedly less impressive than Dormy Inn Otaru. But it is conveniently located near the Nagoya red light district, if that’s your thing.

That’s three new hotels we’ve visited on Honshu, and two red light districts. We’re on a roll.

Deciding to make the best of our time in Nagoya, we checked out the Nagoya science center. It was two buildings and a planetarium. Admission was $6 each, including our tickets to the planetarium show. Eat your heart out Science World. The annual pass ran $20.

So you would be fair in assuming that the Nagoya science world was pretty lame. Except you would be wrong. It was pretty darn awesome. I mean, everything was in Japanese, so it was pretty tough to understand some of the exhibits. But most of the things were interactive, and Jenn and I had lots of fun figuring out the rules of the games. Maybe a little more than we enjoyed the games themselves. And let’s be honest here: zapping things with electricity is fun in any language.

We also checked out the planetarium show. I’m not sure what I was expecting. Maybe a similar script to the quickie 20 minute shows we get back home at our planetarium. Instead, we were treated to a 60 minute presenation on the cosmos, and a 10 minute intro on the NEW planetarium they are currently constructing, which will be a self-enclosed globe suspended between two buildings. It looks very cool.

The cosmos presentation was also pretty incredible, since I learned more about the constellations in a foreign language I could barely follow than I ever did back home. Which leads me to my current hypothesis: the Japanese are really sophisticated robots diguised as humans.

But I digress.

The second stage of our plan was Gero onsen. Unfortunately, after carefully navigating the Japanese language page of the onsen we wanted to stay at, it appeared they were not accepting reseverations anymore. At all. Ever. I’m uncertain if it was a glitch on the website, or if they were remodeling, or if they had gone out of business, but it was clear fate was not on our side.

It was about this time that we realized Nagoya wasn’t really a city for us. We looked at the itinerary of things to do and see and decided we wanted to go elsewhere.

The next day we headed south for Ise, to visit the Umbrella Shrine. The shrine itself is one of the most sacred Shinto shrines in Japan: so sacred, in fact, the priests knock the shrine down every twenty years and build it again a few paces over. When you visit, you don’t actually get to see the shrine, either, because it is that sacred. Instead, you get to view the sort of outer gate bits. And a sea of umbrellas as people wait their turn in the queue.

After the Ise Shrine, the drizzle became genuine rain as we searched for Samurai town. Several misadventures later, we realized that Mie was not for us and we left.

I thought I’d post a few random photos for my blog contribution today.

Almost every restaurant we’ve visited has had awesome jazz music playing in the background. All the classic standards.

The exception was the Dormy Inn in Otaru which had quiet string fugues playing in the hallways and – I kid you not – a room dedictated to the Bachs. The Bach Room was a small corner room with an ample supply of reading material, comfortable chairs, and 24/7 music by all the most famous Bachs.

If our vacation were a movie, it’s had a pretty fantastic soundtrack so far.

After three flights in five days, we paused in Osaka for some R&R. We hit up the same Hearton hotel we stayed at during our first trip, in the same semi-double rooms, and it felt a little like coming home.

Our ambitions for sightseeing in Osaka were minimal during our two night stay, and we succeeded admirably. We did take one morning to hit up Osaka castle and the surrounding park. The park was simply amazing.

There were plenty of foot paths through out the park. And, being it was a Sunday, there were lots of people out enjoying the fine weather. Did I mention the fine weather? After Hokkaido, it was positively summer-like. Clear blue skies, and a warm 10 to 15 degrees most of the day. And cute, fluffy little white clouds dancing in the sky.

We sauntered around the park for some time, enjoying the warm sun, before we decided to tour the castle museum. The castle itself is not original. Most of the feudal castles in Japan were torn down during the Meiji restoration, when a “One Castle, One Province” rule was put into effect. But the replica castle had a lot nicer amenities inside, and the space was put to good use as a museum. Not much to see if you aren’t into history, but all of the exhibits were in Japanese and English, making it a museum the two of us could appreciate more.

After the castle museum, we toured the plum blossom orchard. A few trees were starting to come into colour, but most were still bare. It is a little early yet. We are visiting another plum grove in Kyoto late next week, and hopefully the extra time will give the trees a chance to fully bloom.

It was pretty good. Very impressive skills, coupled with impressive quantities of snow. Very cold. And crowded. The chocolate covered bananas on a stick the food vendors were selling looked interesting.

Yeah. That basically covers it.

We left Kiroro in the morning and headed back to Otaru, whereupon we caught a train to Sapporo, switched trains in Sapporo and headed north to Asahikawa, where we had to stop for further directions because I forgot the name of our destination.

What was our purpose in traveling three hours to an out of the way city in Northern Hokkadio in blizzard like conditions? A sake brewery, of course.

But not just any brewery. The sake they make is not available for sale outside of Japan. And they brew the sake in traditional ice houses, in small batches, with an emphasis on quality over quantity. In American terms, we were hunting for a micro-brewery.

Fortunately, the local tourist information office had maps of the area in English. And at the very edge of the map corner was our target: the Taka…something brewery. Okay, I’ve already forgotten the name again. Japanese is hard, okay?

The snow was falling heavily as we braved the icy streets of Asahikawa. The sidewalks were actually an accumulation of compacted snow, many inches thick; we figured we were walking almost a full foot above the proper ground.

After about twenty minutes on foot, we reached a building that could only be the sake brewery. It was a traditional wooden structure, with thick, traditional wooden doors barring entry.

It was closed.

So with heavy hearts and a sadness in our souls we turned around and..no, I’m just kidding. It was open. The real entrance was around the side.

The floor creaked as we walked inside and admired the rows and rows of bottles. All of this sake had been painstaking crafted. Some had been more painstakingly crafted than others, but we couldn’t tell. I couldn’t read a damn thing.

The nice shop lady came to our rescue. She didn’t speak much English, but she knew the only words we needed to hear: ‘tasting okay?’

Oh, hell YES! A dozen very generous pours later, we returned to the Asahikawa train station, warm in spite of the weather and weighed down with several bottles of extremely delicious sake. The two most expensive bottles will make the return trip with us to Canada, to share with our friends. The other bottles…will not be so fortunate.

Delicious sake soon to be consumed, we salute you!