So this update is a bit late. You want a fight about it?

It was one day after the end of Junten’s sports day. I was tired, sunburned and incredibly confused about what I had just seen. Whatever we did today should not involve riding a train for more than an hour whilst trying to stop people from squashing a small chocolate cake. However, this is exactly what I did as I feel if I ever decide to become a ninja, they would really be impressed in the interviews when I told them I was excellent at defending desserts on public transportation. Or something.

Barney, an American teacher we work with at Junten, invited us to his house to meet his family and explore the local countryside, near the sea in Oiso. That’s right! Countryside! Beaches! I think this about the third time this year I’ve seen some real nature. When I get back to England the first thing I will do is scale a tree and eat leaves for a few days.

As you can see, the sun was one again beating down, although it wasn’t quite as bad as Saturday, I had a full day of jumping between patches of shadows ahead of me. It actually turned a little bit cooler in the afternoon which was perfect as it allowed me to slowly but surely edge out into the sun, like a tiny squirrel exploring a forest grove for the first time. Except I don’t have an irrational fear of Badgers.

I’m sorry to say it, but this update has a picture of flowers in it. The place was just stuffed full of them and it was so nice to see some colour other than grey. I took quite a lot of pictures of flowers, but in the end I decided just to stick with this one. Again, I’m sorry. Prepare to hold your breath…

There, that wasn’t so bad, was it? Plus, look at all the pretty colours!

Anyway, after a short stop and tour of Barney’s half-Western, half-Asian house, we headed out to climb one of the nearby mountains, which is where the title of this article comes in. Along the way we were assaulted by various forms of wildlife, mostly the very small, creepy variety. If you’re squeamish please look away now, as the next photo has 8 legs and would like nothing more than to eat your toes.

The point of wading our way through all this horrible nature was to get a good view out of the tower which adorned the top of the mountain, offering a few as far as Tokyo, and in the opposite direction all the way to Atami. It was truly a stunning view, and even though the sun had gone in a little you could still see a great deal of distance.

I haven’t been up the Tokyo tower yet, but it’s something I really want to do during the day so I can get a photo like this of the city I live, although to see a picture which would sum that up pretty well, click here.

After we made our way back down to the ground, it was time for dinner, which included mashed potato! After that superb twist of culinary fate it was time to go home, as we had an hour and twenty minute train ride ahead of us, and work in the morning. The last thing we did was take a nighttime stroll along the beach close to Barney’s house, filling our hearts with joy and our shoes with sand, before walking to the station.

Thus ends another page in my book of Japan. We made it home by about half past midnight, collapsed into bed, and although I don’t remember going to work at all on Monday morning, I apparently did as I’ve still got my job.

My good friend Leon was lucky enough to net himself two access all area passes to watch some races at the Fuji Speedway, at the foot of Mount. Fuji in Shizuoka Prefecture. Before you ask, I didn’t manage to get any pictures of Fuji itself, the clouds were out in force in that direction.

I feel I should explain now that I know very little to nothing about racing, and thus I will just post a few pictures here and pretend I know what I’m talking about. What I will add is that the journey there and back taught me one valuable lesson - driving around Tokyo is only a good idea in theory, rarely in practice.

As we could not take our go-kart car on the track itself, this is the best racing shot I got. When you enter the arena you get to drive under the infamous Bridgestone arch. I say it’s infamous - even I recognised it and I thought Formula One was the answer to question 6 in my last Chemistry exam.

Whilst I know very little about how to tell who’s winning in a race, I do know that I like the look of this little monster. It ripped around the track at a shocking speed, and it was yellow. I like yellow cars so I enjoyed watching this car thoroughly. I want to say it’s a Lamboughini but I’m not confident enough to do so.

Even if nobody else was having fun, I think the Michelin man was enjoying himself. Possibly a little bit too much as he wouldn’t leave the poor girls alone. Although neither would the photographers…

Those vultures!

Once the race had started, we headed down to one of the more dangerous corners on the track, hoping to see some wicked awesome crashes. Instead we saw lots of cars turning around a corner at amazing speeds, which was pretty cool, although you can do the same in England for free by standing at a roundabout five minutes before a world cup match starts.

So there we are. I had a fantastic time and enjoyed myself very much, despite not really knowing what was happening. I thought I’d finish today with a picture I am very happy with. I met a celebrity at the race. Quite a significant one. Don’t all gasp at once…

I promise this will be the last update for a while that includes shrines. Well actually I have no intention of keeping that promise, but I think the next update won’t have any in. Although I might just sneak one in at the end.

Yumi, one of Matt’s adult class students and a great friend and helper to us offered to take us for a day trip to Kawagoe, a small town not far from Tokyo, for a day of sightseeing and being roasted by the scorching hot sun. Needless to say I grabbed my camera, forgot my sunblock and headed off on our way.

Of course, the first place we visited was a shrine complex near the station, called Kitain. As usual, the whole place was incredibly scenic, however it was also crawling with crowds so we didn’t stick around very long. Just long enough for me to take a few photos I could post here and bore you with. Haha!

As it was absolutely baking hot, we didn’t really fancy standing around all day. Both Matt and myself are quite fair and thus prone to sunburn, and I was beginning to feel like toast as it was. So we quickly made our way into the centre of Kawagoe, stopping along the way a few times to, you guessed it, look at shrines.

Nope, I didn’t buy any. Infact, all I did buy from Kawagoe were lots of sweets because I love sweets. Mmmm.

The centre of Kawagoe was even worse than the shrines for people. I’m talking Shibuya at 7pm on a Friday busy. I have no idea why there were so many people there, but it was hard to move and even harder to restrain myself from beating down a few slow walking people who kept cutting me off. Just because you’re not in a car doesn’t mean you can walk out directly into the path of of a speeding foreigner you crazy people!

We stopped at lunch time for some Chinese Ramen, which was excellent. I think of all the food in Japan, the one thing I’ll miss the most is restaurant-quality Ramen. Just a big steaming bowl of noodles and soup. You really cannot beat it, and I’ve never seen anything in England that even comes close. It makes me sad. I think on my last day here I will order 4,149 bowls of the stuff and empty them into a bathtub. Mmmm. Bath of Ramen…

One thing we were very lucky to see was the flower festival ritual. Now I know what you’re thinking. “A flower festival? Laughing! Children playing! Joy!” Well, you’d be quite wrong, as apparently the flower festival is quite a serious affair in Kawagoe. I didn’t understand a single word of the prayer, but I did try to avoid stepping on any dandelions afterwards.

We continued our journey through Kawagoe, stopping for souvenirs, candy and repeatedly whilst Yumi could find this sweet potato stuff that only one shop in the entire universe sells. Before long though, it was time to head home, if only to stop Matt taking strange pictures of himself on my camera.

I told you dropping that Disneyland update in between the two Nagoya updates would work well! Haha!

I awoke at around 10am in my luxury not-so-bad crappy hotel, thanks to the guy on the other side of the razor-thin hotel wall listening to his TV at a level sufficent enough to blow the windows out. Needless to say I was not a happy bunny as I headed to the station. The plan was to quickly dump my bag in a coin locker at the station, explore Nagoya a bit, then hop on the train to Gifu. Unfortunatly, despite big shiny “Coin Lockers This Way!” signs, they are still impossible to locate, and I had to resort to asking the security guards in a shaky voice. Eventually though they did all the hard work for me and I was on my way.

I decided to follow my nose in Nagoya on a quest for breakfast. On the way I took a load of random snaps of whatever caught my interest, resulting in a load of rubbish pictures, and only a few good ones. The traffic light photo, that is currently at the top of the blog was one of said random photos, although it really was the only good one out of about sixty billion. Nagoya sort of reminded me of Tokyo, in that it had skyscrapers and lots of people, although neither were quite as dense as Tokyo. It certantly was a lot nicer walking around without having to avoid schoolgirls, old people and bycycles every ten seconds.

However, Nagoya failed to hold my interest after I had found breakfast, so I quickly made my way back to the station and hopped on the train to Gifu. The train ride itself was about 30 minutes, and I think I took that train three or four times. As a result I can give a really rather impressive description of the decoration on the back of the seats, because that’s all I had to do on the journey. It was blue. With red lines.

When I arrived in Gifu, I had half a day to kill while Mari was at her part time job. In a throwback to my Kyoto trip, I headed straight of the shrines, because I sure do love me some Japanese shrines.

I know I say this all the time, but they really were pretty shrines. One thing that did happen, for the first time ever, is that I actually got a nice photo of one of the statues in the shrine.

Isn’t he nice. Well, he doesn’t look very friendly, but then if you had to sit on that stone guarding a bright orange shrine all day, you wouldn’t be grinning at people with shiny cameras come to take photos of you at work. I bet he works overtime, too…

Quite by accident, I found myself sitting in the park just a few minutes walk from the shrine, when something caught my eye. It was a steel staircase, that wound its way up about three stories for no apparent reason. As it was outside in a park, I assumed I wouldn’t get in much trouble if I went up it to take a look around. It gave me a nice view of the park itself, the shrine and the surrounding area, but it didn’t end there. Leading away from the top was a walkway which lead to a path, which wound it’s way up through a forest and up what looked like a mountain. As I plan to climb Mt. Fuji in the summer, I thought this was the best opportunity I might get to practice. So I began to climb.

About half an hour later it became clear that this was not a mountain but just a big hill. Still, it provided some excellent views of the city.

Eventually I made it to the top of the hill, although I didn’t stick around very long because I was being turned into a human barbeque by the sun and local insects. Infact, I made my way back down pretty sharpish, and headed back to the station to meet Mari.

Mari had brought with her a present. It weight around a tonne, was made out of steel, and went very very fast. That’s right! She’d brought a fighter plane!

Ok, well, a car. Still, it greatly improved our options for exploring Gifu. In the end we went for coffee (again!) and then went for a drive around the mountains. At one point we actually pulled up to the same place I’d just walked to earlier in the day (although I was a real man and had taken the dirt path. This had nothing to do with me not knowing there was a road up there. None at all.) Then we went around more shrines (woohoo!), had more coffee, then it was time to say goodbye. Curse these weekend long trips, they’re just too short!

Gifu is a super cool place, totally unspoiled by tourism (unlike Kyoto) and really quiet (unlike Tokyo). I’m currently planning out my summer holiday, and I think I may sweep by this place if I can, either on the way out or the way back. Although at the moment my holiday plans are top secret. If I tell you any more, I’ll have to kill you.