Flower Field Adventure

So a few days ago, my host family decided we were going to go on a trip.  In Japan, day trips and weekend trips are a big thing, because vacation days are somewhat few in number in the majority of occupations.  Thanks to that mentality, it was decided we'd take a day trip to Hitsujiyama Kouen, home of the Shibazakura flower field.  You'll see what that means in a second.

By car, it was about an hour and a half away, which was not bad at all.  Seeing as how I am still very much in the "everything is fascinating" stage of the travel experience, looking out the window was positively enthralling.  We stopped at a 7/11 a few minutes into the journey to get drinks for lunch, but my strawberry juice (pictured above) was long gone before that.

Around three-fourths of the way there, we took a break at this rest stop.  The view was much better than this, and that's really saying something, because just look at this picture.  The forests in Japan, though not as prevalent as in the past, are incredibly dense.  Many of them don't even have room to swing your arms in a circle.

The rest sotp was selling pet stag beetles for whatever reason.  I wanted one, and then I didn't.  It was enough just to see them in person, since they're not found in Georgia.

Here's the river that was near the rest stop.  \Again, people say that Japan lacks natural spaces, but that's because the ones it does have are not like they are in America.

Look at that huge statue up there.  I have no idea what it is for, but I love the positioning.

More of the view from the rest stop.

Birds made their homes under the eaves of the rest stop.  There were babies, but we couldn't see them.

Bamboo is native to the country, so when it grows, it gets big.  I'd never before seen bamboo this big around.

Here's the flower field.  Yes, this is more of a sunny day attraction, but it was either go yesterday or miss the flowers completely, so we just went for it.  My host family had never been before, either.

So yeah, flower field.  As these were being taken, my host family ended up taking a picture for a somewhat older couple, and as they walked off my host mom realized the woman was a famous actress on TV.  I don't know actresses very well, so I had no idea who she was, but we all spent the whole rest of the day trying to think of her name.  My host dad even asked her if she is on TV, but she said no and my host mom thinks she was lying.  I'm going to side with my host mom, because the lady did seem familiar.

There were sheep but none of them wanted to say hello.  Also, they were pretty dirty and busy eating grass.

So the food area at the park had some honey with giant hornets in it.  I have no idea why, but I really, really wanted some.  Can you imagine the looks on people's faces if you ate a jar of this in public?

More food area.

These are lightly-fried potato things covered in miso.  They were good, but being fired means they were not something of which I could handle very much.

I had udon as the main lunch item.  It was from the best food stand at the park, supposedly, and it was pretty good.

There were lots of mountains.

These are "Hundred Year Inarizushi".  If you don't know what inarizushi is, I can't explain it very well, but the "hundred year" prefix was apparently just to denote when this type was first invented.  It was good, and would actually make an okay dessert.

More flower fields.

On the way back, we stopped at Koma Shrine, which is where people go to wish their hardest to become important and influential.  People that aspire to be prime minister frequent the place.  I don't know what's going on with this face here, but it was in the parking lot and I love it.

Here's the shrine gate.

This path lead all the way up the mountain to a world of enchantment and surprises.  More on that later.

Have any of you ever heard of the thin where people fold 1,000 paper cranes, and if they make a wish as they fold them then it'll come true?  These are all bundles of 1,000 such cranes.  I don't know what people wished for, but it's usually something like disease recovery.

Anyway, I decided to go up the path, and about halfway up I found this little shrine.  It's probably to Inari, hence the fox things, but I'm not sure.

At the top of the mountain was this shrine gate and the small shrine behind it.  I don't know what they do with it, but that's just fine.  Eventually I found another path and took that, eventually arriving at...

Another graveyard!  For a cemetery on top of a mountain, it was actually quite big.  It was also one of the only such places I've been to in Japan where some of the monuments were old enough to be in complete disrepair.  The pictures mostly speak for themselves, provided you keep in mind that it was just me up there because my host parents didn't want to make that hike.

This grave doesn't even have a normal marker.

Anyway, this is someone's personal garden near the shrine.  After walking around a bit, we headed back home after some errands,

Errands involved stopping at Popora, but when it came time to leave I was not ready to leave Book-Off, so I opted to walk home.  One hour and about two dollars later, I dug up this wonderful piece of Yousei Teikoku history, an interview they did in a recently-defunct magazine called AnikanR back in 2007.  I'm going to try and translate the whole thing.

So yeah, that was yesterday.  It was my first real trip to the countryside, and I was very satisfied.  Over here, I'm a pretty big fan of all the landscapes, be they natural or man-made, so it's nice to be able to get good views of both.