Hida no Sato and Takayama

This past weekend Yuka and I went up to Takayama in Gifu. Its a three-hour bus ride through the mountains and when you arrive: fucking cold. We spent Wednesday walking around Takayama, crashed at a Japanese-style hotel, and saw the surrounding area (Hida no Sato) on the following day. We made it home by 10pm on Thursday night and went into Nagoya for the Christmas lights and crappy artwork.

We made reservations at a Takayama Ryokan (Japanese inn) a week earlier and Yuka got us some books on what to see. On Wednesday we saw the Takayama-jinya, which is an old government building from the Edo era. Taxes were collected there and asses were beaten. They had some torture equipment on display and while its not quite up to Braveheart levels of awesomeness, it did make my balls tremble a bit. In addition to the biting cold, it started to rain while we were in the government building, which forced us to splurge on a fabulous-looking yellow umbrella from a sidewalk vendor. We had some Matcha (thick and bitter green tea) and Japanese sweets, raw beef sushi (its fucking awesome), and then saw some house that's an architectural masterpiece (for some stupid reason). We headed to our hotel around 5 o'clock.


Staying at the Ryokan was a cool experience. Some Ryokan are built around Onsen (volcanic hot springs) and are the most popular. Our place had hot tubs but thanks to the lack of a volcano, wasn't technically an Onsen. I took a dip (naked and on the guy-only side of the hotel) and found another scale with which to measure my physical decline. I now weigh 71kg., which (as I just looked it up online) is 156 pounds. I'm wasting away. That's about 30 pounds lighter than when I arrived. I might now be underweight for my age and height. Anywho, I stayed in the water too long, and thanks to not having had much to eat that day, almost fainted in the hallway. I got really dizzy when I got out of the water and had to lean on stuff to get back to my room. Yuka said that when she first went to an Onsen when she was little the same thing happened, so she was able to take care of me. This included fanning me with a magazine and trying not to laugh.

We changed into yukatas (light kimonos) and had our dinner served to us in the room. We bought a bottle of fancy-pants sake earlier in the day, so we had that with the meal as well. After dinner, the woman who had served it came back to clean up our mess and make our beds. Yadda yadda yadda, it was an awesome night. We watched some late night TV and I was totally able to follow this comedy show. My Japanese is shit but getting better.

The next day we had breakfast on the first floor, Yuka took another dip in the hot tubs, and then we checked out. She insisted on paying for everything and I've been unable to get her to take some money from me since. I guess my plan is to treat her to a stay at a Ryokan in Tokyo for New Year's (if that's even possible on such short notice).


The next day we went to Hida no Sato (Hida's village) which is a well-preserved village cum museum. All of the houses were open and you could walk around inside them but as they all had tatami, we had to keep taking our shoes off. In the biting cold of northern Gifu, this was a problem. We skipped several of the houses because we couldn't stand the thought of letting our feet get any colder. We got some good pictures of the village and after a few hours of that, we got Japanese sweets again, took a scenic hike in the mountains near Takayama, and got more raw beef sushi. Dinner was ramen noodles (Takayama is known for its ramen it turns out) and we killed the rest of our sake on the bus ride home. We got drunk and loud and then found out later that almost every single person on the bus with us could speak perfect English. I can't remember what we were talking about but it wasn't very Japaneesy. I kept getting in everyone's way as they tried to get off the bus and everyone kept saying things like 'Oh, excuse me, can I get by you?' I was shocked. No one here can speak English that well. Where did those people come from?