Wakayama Weekend

So Golden Week has come and gone. The trains have returned to their usual level of crowdedness and I've been able to find a seat here and there in my travels. At the end of the Golden Week holiday I went to visit Wakayama, which is closer to central Japan than where I live here in Himeji. It's just south of the Nara area. A few of my friends and I drove down there to camp out in a log cabin in the mountains. The old couple that runs the place actually built the place, including the bath (which was carved out of a single piece of wood!) and the dining shelter which had four grills staggered across the room in little fire pits. We did all of our own cooking and it was really reasonable. The bath was a private outdoor bath that couples can enjoy and it looked out over the valley beneath our area. The following morning, after a night of glorious feasting, I woke up suddenly at 7 a.m. to the sound of a gentle rain and went outside to sit on the small porch. A fog had crept in along the valley floor obscuring the village save for a few houses that were built on the mountainside above the fogline. The rain was a light drizzle and I sat cross-legged in silence for an hour before going back to bed. The whole experience was like being sent back in time 400 years. I listened to the sound of nature in a country where I'm always under the barrage of urban noise like buzzing lights and rumbling cars. I was back in nature and it was awesome. Unfortunately, my camera battery had died the night before so I couldn't snap any pictures of the scene, but in a way it's nice to have had that little moment to myself. What pictures I was able to take I've posted above. Enjoy.

The next day on the return trip home we stopped in at a small family run restaurant just outside of Wakayama and they had this huge crab (probably about a metre wide, from claw to claw) living in a pond that was built into the floor of the place. Right in the middle of the dining area. A few times an ambitious leg would slip over the side of the stone wall keeping the prisoner from taking off. I've never seen a crab that big in my life, and shudder to think at what a bad-tempered crab like that might be capable of should he managed to escape from the saltwater prison they were holding him in. His living mates were starfish, abalone and fugu, the famous blowfish that nearly killed Homer Simpson. I think it would probably cost about $250 to order that bigass crab, and I expect that they've probably grown somewhat attached to the guy.

Well, it was back to work this past week, and I'll be in the office all of this week hoping that my coworkers don't decide to call in sick and force me to go and cover at their schools. I simply must finish the Dark Tower books before they drive me insane.

Well, I'm off to have Chinese tea at a Korean restaurant with a Japanese friend. I love Asia.