Kate’s Quests

Mom came to visit August 17th and she’ll leave in a couple of days. Hence the reason I haven’t blogged in awhile…we’ve been doing stuff. We’ve seen the sights around the house, we’ve gone to Kamakura, Yokohama, Tokyo, Hakone and Kisoji.

Hakone was the big trip so I’ll start with that. We stayed at a modern Ryokan called the Tenseien. It was straight out of the 70’s and as I said to mom…our weekend was the most affordable way to time travel. The entry way was decked out in gold. The chandeliers were hilarious. Long diamond strands falling from round orange lights. It looked like every 70’s tv hotel scene I can think of. We wandered around the place and the parking lot is facing the falls. Up the hill a little is a shrine, but we didn’t venture up there. It was too steep and we didn’t feel like it. We got there at noon and had a few hours until check in so we wandered around. We got lunch at an “upscale” Japanese Italian restaurant. I say “upscale” because while they thought they were totally authentic and classy, they were also stuck in the 70’s. And while they did have classical music playing…they also seated us on plastic chairs. Once we were able to check in to the inn, we were brought up to our room and served tea. We changed into our Yukata’s (cotton robes) and headed upstairs to the hot spring baths. Two steps out the door, however, and we were told by an inn lady to stay right there as she sprinted down the hall. Looking confusedly at each other, mom and I did as we were told and waited. After a few moments she came hurrying down the hallway and shooed us back into our room. She handed me a different sized Yukata and had me change into it. She tied the belt around me twice and made sure the bow was in the back. She then turned to mom and while muttering, “excuse me, excuse me, excuse me” she opened mom’s robe, adjusted it to make it fit better and tied the sash expertly. She said, “This like proper Japanese kimono!” She gave us a nod and we thanked her and she scooted down the hall. After some giggling we headed up for a proper Japanese soak.

We came back downstairs a few hours later to find our dinner laid out for us. It was absolutely beautiful. There were plates of sushi, pork and cabbage, miso soup, fish soup, crab, prawns, beef with a peanut dipping sauce, tofu, eggplant and some others we had never seen before. The sushi was great, but the rest? Not so much. Everything was cold, which is totally normal Japanese, but I can’t say that cold crab and prawns were that appealing. We tried a bit of everything and that was good. After dinner we got a massage and fell right asleep.

Waking up the next morning we decided to leave the luggage at the hotel and headed to the main part of Hakone (about an hour away). We took the train, which made a lot of switchbacks on the mountain, to the cable car and then took that to the ropeway. I then basically followed the trip that DJ took me on in January. We took the ropeway down to the lake and took the pirate ship cruise to Hakone Shrine. This time, though, the sun wasn’t out and the whole area was covered in a low and mysterious fog. It was as if Mt. Fuji didn’t even exist. If you didn’t know it was there, lurking in the background, you would never know. Once we got off the cruise, we headed to the shrine. This time we didn’t actually go all the way up to the shrine, but stayed at the waters edge and got wet with rain. It was beautiful, though. There was an elderly Japanese couple sitting by the water and eating rice from their bento box. We stayed for a few minutes and then had to go back in time to make the bus so we didn’t get stranded there.

Later on in the week we visited Kisoji on a military tour. I had taken only one military tour before and that was to Hakone. It was a great tour and we enjoyed it a lot. This trip, however, was not very fun. We got up at 3:00am to make it to the meeting point by 4am. We got on the bus and the fun began. It was a five and a half hour trip so a perfect time to get some sleep, right? Except that a bunch of parents thought it would be good to bring their small children on a tour with a ten hour bus ride. So…we had crying, fighting, whining, running up and down the aisles and so on. “Mom, while you were looking out the window, he hit me!” and “I did not!” was the reply. We had about 15 adults and about 12 children. The oldest child was about 10. The youngest looked 3. TOO YOUNG! Anyway, our first stop was in Magome. We arrived and she just turned us loose to check out the place. We soon got back on the bus and headed to make our own lunch, soba noodles. It was fun to make, but labor intensive so I doubt that I’ll ever make my own. Especially when I can buy a pack for $.50. We ate our lunch which included tempura, the noodles we had made and rice triangles bought for us from a convenience store (classy, indeed).

The trip back wasn’t nearly as bad because some of the parents brought movies. They showed them on the TV in the front of the bus. That kept the kids quiet for the most part, which was a relief. We ended our day at 10pm and I was very thankful to be in my own bed.