My Tiger with Yuka

Yuka and I caught the 7:40 shuttle to Matsumoto from the Meitetsu Bus Station. It was a 3 and a half hour ride but nice because its through the Japanese Alps and there are a lot of beautiful blah blah blah. We were thinking about renting bikes for the day but as the area we were going to explore was pretty small it seemed unnecessary.

Immediately after we arrived we found out that the local specialty is soba noodles, so we got a girl in the tourist office to recommend a place. The restaurant had aquariums at every table, filled with large stinking black bugs. Appetizing. We found one of the only tables in the place where you couldn't see or smell the bugs. I was the only person in the entire restaurant (it was a pretty small place) who ordered hot soba noodles. Everyone else, including Yuka, was eating them cold. I guess I have no idea how to order food here. To add to the delightful atmosphere, this androgenous-looking little kid would NOT stop staring at me from the time we arrived to the time we walked out the door. Its mom was nice enough to keep jabbing it with her elbow, but it wouldn't take the hint. Apparently Deliverance-country Japan doesn't get many foreigners. This is a part of Japan known for its horse meat. By the way, they (like the late, great ODB) like it raw.


After lunch we headed over to Matsumoto-Jo and checked it out. We took somewhere in the neighborhood of a billion pictures, but I managed to whittle it down to a manageable 120. These are all in Flickr now, so enjoy. The castle was cool. Its the oldest of the 5-tiered castles, and only Inuyama-Jo is older (I think). The only thing that seems worth mentioning about the design of the castle is that all the stairways are ridiculously steep. They were set up that way to make the castle easier to defend against invading armies and elderly Japanese tourists.

While Yuka and I were walking around I told her about one of my first blind-dates in Japan. This girl asked me if it was ok to call our meeting a 'date' and I told her she could call it anything she wanted to. I can't remember if it was her or I that decided to call our trip to Matsumoto a 'tiger' but it stuck because we both thought it was really funny. We've planned a puppy together for this Thursday and a giraffe at some point in the near future. She wanted to have a giraffe next but I told her that its customary in the States to wait a little while before giraffing with a girl. Not that I don't want to giraffe with her, its just kinda fast, thats all. I told her that I would panda her brains out though whenever she wants me to.

Not too far from the castle is the first Western-style school in Japan. I didn't think it was that impressive though because the curriculum at the school was still Japanese, just the architecture was Western. We were able to sit down at the tiny antique desks and play around with everything which was cool. The Japanese guy who was watching over the room encouraged me to get up to the front of the class and slam the teaching-stick down on the desk. Each desk had its own chalk and blackboard which we were allowed to play with too. In the above photo, my board says 'advertisement' and 'demon' because those were the first kanji that came to me.

After that we got some Japanese sweets at a cafe. The waitress/hostess brought us out a little box with 5 kinds of sweets inside and we were served black tea and matcha (thick and bitter green tea) with our selection. Matcha rocks because it hella cleanses the palette. It wasn't cheap especially considering Japanese sweets aren't much larger than my thumbnail.

We had exhausted Matsumoto's sights after the school and the castle, so we wandered around a little bit. There was a street lined with touristy shops by the river, so we hung out there for a little while. We found this awesome statue of samurai frogs killing a toad. The plaque on the front said (according to Yuka's translation) 'dirty frog samurai.' She thought it was an ugly statue but I think the lady doth protest too much.

We got curry for dinner and bought some alcohol for the ride home. The bus came at 7:10pm and because we hadn't had much to eat we both got blasted on single cans of chuhi. We counted up all the things that I had done for the first time and got to 10. We're going to Okazaki on Thursday and to Hikone on Biwa-ko at some point in the immediate future. I'll post pictures as I take them. Miss you all.