Obon

I've been meaning to update this all week; my apologies. Here's what I did the rest of last week!

Friday, Monica* met me at Nagoya station and we caught a train going out to Gifu, the next prefecture over. I had no idea where we were going; Monica had planned this as a surprise. The day was greyish and hellishly humid, and it's a good thing the trains we took were air conditioned. We got off at a little station that was almost literally in the middle of nowhere, walked to the nearest convenience store to get directions, then walked up the road into the mountains.



Turned out we were going to the Flower Festival Memorial Gardens, which is an absolutely gigantic park full of gardens, and famous for its hundreds of varieties of roses. It smelled absolutely divine there, even though the roses were in between their peak seasons, and so the flowers weren't quite so spectacular to look at. It was an awesome afternoon, though, hanging out and walking through gardens, taking pics of flowers, eating sakura and lavender flavoured ice cream, and plotting all sorts of things to do with our lives in Japan. The gardens do traditional Japanese tea ceremonies in the fall, and we agreed that we definitely had to come back to see the flowers in full bloom and attend a tea ceremony.

On Saturday, I met up with Prem and Miki (both from my church) and Miki's sister, who doesn't speak much English at all, and we went to the Nagoya Port Aquarium to look at the fishies. They have a killer whale, like eight dolphins, two beluga, an embarrassment of sea turtles and all sorts of wacky wonderful fish from the Japanese ocean and down across the Australian ocean. Oh, also penguins, because there's a special about Antarctica on now. We saw the half-hour dolphin show, which was amazing even though it was outside and thus stinking hot, again, and wandered through the aquarium learning about the various critters. A lot of the info was in Japanese, but I managed to get a good learning experience... and I also discovered something. I miss learning. I was like a kid in a candy store around the "evolution of whales" exhibit and the models of whale skeletons and all that; part of my brain that hasn't been exercised in months was able to stretch and flex and it felt amazing. I need to go to more museums and science centres around here; Nagoya has quite a few.

Then, on Sunday, I was up early again to meet a motley bunch of teachers, students, and friends at Ichinomiya station and pile into two separate cars to make the hour-and-a-half-long drive up to Gujo in Gifu for some camping and Bon dancing! We got to our campsite around 2pm; it had rained on the way up, but it was beautiful by the time we got there. We were in the middle of the mountains, and it was lovely; a couple degrees cooler than in Nagoya, and definitely more rugged! We set up camp in the provided teepee tents, moved our stuff around, then headed off to the river for an ice-cold swim. It's the kind of cold that makes your bones ache; fed by mountain streams, clear as glass, rocks on the bottom, and absolutely wonderful on a sunny day when the humidity's at 90% and the temperature's at 32. After swimming, we trekked back to the campsite and had the most amazing barbeque, before tying ourselves into yukata (I had some help from the other girls, being rather hopeless with an obi), piled into the cars, and drove into town.

We danced for a solid four hours. In the centre of town, there was a raised platform with the musicians and singers; loudspeakers were set up down the streets so the dancers could still hear the music further away - the dancing extended outwards in a large X down all four main streets; the shortest line still extended past at least eight shops/buildings down the street. Each dance went for about 20 minutes, enough time to pick up the steps and not look like an absolute lunatic flailing around next to the townsfolk who actually knew what they were doing. We took a break halfway through to wander the non-dancing parts of the main streets, which were full of festival food and games stalls. We found a little alley where we could sit and stick our feet into the water - which I forgot to mention; a giant river rushes through Gujo, and the town has water fountains and little streams running all through it. It's famous for its clear, clean water, so we dabbled our feet in it (it was ice cold, of course) and felt refreshed before dancing again. Twice, I had older ladies fix up my obi; the second time, the lady basically re-dressed me, instead of just tweaking my obi like the first lady. She was very no-nonsense about it, and it was a hilarious, bizarre experience.

Anyway, we headed back to the campsite around 1am, fell into bed, and rose with the dawn (about 5:30 am). I got out of the tent for good at about twenty after 7, because I finally could not stand the oven-like temperatures and gave up hope for sleep. We had the leftovers of our bbq for breakfast, went for a swim, then bundled back into our car and drove home (the other car stayed to go river rafting, but we in the first car were too hungover and strapped for cash to consider rafting an attractive option at 8 in the morning). I got home at about 1:30pm, did some laundry, did some groceries, and that was it.

This week's been fairly normal; not much to report. I've a short weekend, though; I have to go in for an extra, day-long follow-up training on Monday, my regular day off. I'm not too chuffed about it, but I'm consoling myself that at least I get paid (a meager amount) for it. Now, off to bed, for Saturday is my earliest, and busiest, day at work!

*My friend who is a fellow teacher; we were in the same training group in May.