Japan Day 9 - It's Turned Out Oranges & Lemons Again!
Evenin' All. Now, I know that I've been posting a lot of photographs of food lately. As a refreshing change, today's blog contains some really lovely and unusual photographs.
Before I begin, I discovered something interesting when talking to Sayaka and Mark earlier. Apparently, I've been saying "kireee des ne" wrongly. You may remember that I told you that it meant "you look beautiful" and that I said it to both Nonchan and Sayaka on the day of the dinner party. As it turns out, I was actually saying "Kiri des ne". It's amazing how a simple mis-pronunciation canmean that instead of telling them they looked beautiful, I actually called them both a cucumber. No wonder Nonchan looked at me slightly confused when I said it! Today, we left Nagano behind and headed South for about 380 kilometres, to Hikone. We stopped a few times en-route, all of which were pre-planned. We had a Japanese Sat Nav to help/hinder us. However, when we tried to enter the name of the town into the Sat Nav, it told us it didn't exist. Mark quickly thought of a work around - he brought up Google on his mobile phone, searched for restaurants in that town, took the PHONE NUMBER of the top one listed and entered it into the Sat Nav. *bing*, it pinpointed it and displayed the route. Towns don't exist, it seems, but phone numbers do! Our first stop along the journey was at Ina. The first two photographs, including one of Sayaka eating (that's 3 consecutive blog posts where I've included a photo of someone eating), were taken there. This was also the location of my sighting of the biggest wasp I've ever seen. Revelation: the wasps in Japan are as big as airships! After our stop at Ina, we headed off towards our lunch destination - a quaint little area called Magome. This really was a beautiful little place, and most of the remaining photographs on today's blog post are from there. Photograph 3 is of, what I named, 'the windy pig' - a strange little hanging pig that was dangling from the top of a shop front. It looks a little bit like a pig with a leaf stuck up it's bottom (though, when you look close-up, they are actually feathers). When the wind blows, the propellor thing turns around. I've heard of 'wind farms', but this is ridiculous. I will leave you to look through the rest of the photographs 4 to 14. I think that most of them speak for themselves. I loved the scenery and colours of that traditional little Japanese street. To make things interesting, there's also a silly photo of me in there, for you to spot. Photograph 15 is of lunch (ok, so I do have one photo of food in this blog). It was a dish with rice at the bottom and fried chicken and vegetables on the top. Very nice indeed. As a side-point, I have to say that today is the first day that I have really found myself craving English food. The thought of a nice prawn sandwich washed down with a berry smoothie. Mmmmmmmmmmmmm. Photograph 16 is of a couple of masks, from a large collection of hanging masks at the restaurant that we ate lunch in. To me, it looks as if the one on the right has blown off and the one on the left has just got a whiff of it. Photograph 17 is of the three of us, as we took in a spectacular mountain view. After enjoying our lunch and walk, we headed off to Hikone. Arriving at our hotel, I took photograph 18 out of the window. Tomorrow we are going to visit our friend Liz, who is currently teaching and living in Japan. Sayaka mentioned to me that it will be nice for me to have another English person to use my humour on. I reminded her that I don't have any humour - I'm a very serious, somber person… it's just that no-one takes what I say seriously! Right, that's it from me for tonight. There is one thing from today that I haven't included in this blog, as I'm going to do a separate blog post about it tomorrow. You lucky people!