I survived this weekend!

What's poppin' peeps? It's in this last month here that I've realized how much I miss that kind of talk back home in Chicago...

So this weekend was fun. And I'm not even being sarcastic. Totally for real. We (my host family and I) did so much stuff that it's almost troublesome to have to write it all down. But I'll do it. For this blog's occasional reader.

I'll start on the second of the month, though, because that's when my host brother's birthday was. Who is, by the way, one of my favorite people in this universe. He's one of the funniest people I've ever met and he only just turned seven. So the 2nd was his birthday. Funnily enough, everyone but him went to a gaming store that day because my oldest host sister really wanted to buy some manga. I'm not quite sure why he didn't come now that I think about it... Anyway, the store was GIGANTIC. And they sold EVERYTHING (besides food). Clothes, accessories (phone, hair, etc.), video games, music, manga... the manga. I can't even. It was just.... so. Much. Manga. It reminded me of a Borders (RIP) filled with only manga. They had everything you could possibly imagine, and since the store sold them used (which I actually prefer), they were all around 150 yen (a little over $1.50). Which is RIDICULOUS considering the manga I buy in the States (in English, mind you) is around $10.00 apiece. I spent a lot of time looking at that, and getting lost. I'm serious guys. It was a giant building. And there were so many aisles at weird angles all over the place that I got lost a few times. Carlos, I though of you, because I know you would've been in paradise surrounded by so many video games.

Apart from that trip, the 2nd was very laid back. We had sushi for dinner which totally made my day, though. And then there was cake of course...

That was by far the best birthday cake I've had here so far. There was even a little mini cheesecake on it!

So then, on the 3rd, my host parents decided we should all take a walk, "for our health!". It wasn't until we (host parents, siblings, and myself) were already a good ways away from the house that someone told me the walk was 3 kilometers one way. I wasn't exactly dressed for that kind of walk, so it was kind of a struggle, but it ended up being really fun. We walked to this small mountain (yes, in Japan, there IS such a thing as a small mountain) that we climbed straight up (there were stairs of course). A daunting task it seemed, but we made it!

Yaaaaaaay! There's my little country village. Look at all them farms...

So after the climb (.... I did not just make a Miley Cyrus reference...), we started back down a different way. On the way down, we came upon a little park that we, of course, had to stop to play on. What was funny about this park (to me, at least), was that it was all on a very steep hill. WOAHHHH! I know, crazy, right? Well, in Illinois, everything's pretty flat, so I'm not used to that kind of thing.

 Yeah... I know you can't really see the park, but you get the idea... hopefully.

Going home wasn't as bad as getting to the mountain; it warmed up a bit and thanks to all the walking it was much more bearable.

The day after that, we were off again. This time by car to Aso!... again. Which is completely fine with me because I've come to love car rides in Japan. And not the ones in the city. The ones in the country. And I'm talking few to no houses and mountains everywhere. EVERYWHERE. And trees. And in the winter, a faint sprinkling of snow on the mountains. Doesn't get better than that. I'm serious.

Last time we went to Aso was when we went to that spa with the dome rooms on the Aso Farm resort, and the Aso volcano. This time, we chose to forgo the volcano and instead opted for a shrine. Shirogawa shrine, to be exact. Apparently it's also home to the origin of a river that flows all the way back to Kumamoto (aka, civilization). There was a part of the stream that you could drink from, even.

Then we got to do omikuji, which is random fortunes written on pieces of paper that you fold up and tie onto a string. If you watch anime or read manga, you know what I'm talking about.

I still am not quite sure what mine was about, since my host parents don't speak much English and the fortunes are really obscure Japanese that even my host siblings didn't fully understand. All I got from it was that I should study... Only Japan, people.

Onward! We went back to the Aso Farmland Resort because they had a bunch of Christmas lights set up that my host parents wanted to take us all to see. It wasn't as elaborate at the one we went to see by car, but it was pretty anyway.

At the very end of the resort there's a bunch of little dome-shaped buildings that are apparently used for people who pay to stay. Like a hotel, basically, only 20x cuter. I was too busy being astounded to take a picture.

 

 So that'll have to do. It's off of google, but that's pretty much what they look like. Dear Lord are they cute. I want to come back to Aso just to stay in one.

On the way back, we stopped by that giant crater we went to the last time and found that this time it was covered in snow. It wasn't much, but it was enough to make my host siblings really excited. There's a huge pond there that froze over as well and the kids really wanted to see it. So see it we did. Not only did we see it, we walked on it. It was something like 10 cm thick, though, so I was terrified the whole time that it was going to break under me and I'd go down into the icy water. Even my host dad, who's six feet tall, was able to walk around, albeit with a constant crunch of ice cracking underneath him. 

 

That was it, really, for the 4th.

The 5th we (host parents and siblings) left for 大分 (Ooita) to meet up with my host father's parents and do some sightseeing.

We picked them up in 北九州市 (Kitakyushu City) and stopped by a church headed by a friend of my host family's. We didn't even sit through a service, just stopped to talk to the priest (pastor? I'm not sure what you call that person in my host family's religion) and some friends that were there. We were there for about twenty minutes, and then were back on our way to Oita. We stopped again a few hours later to see yet another shrine. This time, walking up to the actual shrine was much more difficult because it was on a hill.

This was the entrance...

 And here's a tree that's some 200 years old. It might have been 800... I'm not sure why, but I'm getting those two numbers confused. :S

In any case, it was a really old tree. What's fascinating about this (and pretty much any) shrine is that any place that people throw money to as an offering is within grabbing distance, and yet no one ever takes any.

After stopping by this shrine, it was straight to 別府 (Beppu -- the town we were staying in) and our hotel.

That night, we all stayed in a 旅館 (Ryokan -- Japanese-style Inn). The truly nice thing about this place was... it had an onsen! That you could use whenever you wanted. Say WHAT? So happy. I ended up going twice that night: once right when we arrived and again after I took a bath before going to bed (the bath was the same room as the onsen).

Dinner last night... guys, it was a lot. So I'm just going to post pictures of it and explain each one briefly.

Here's an individual pot with rice in it. It cooked for most of dinner and we ate it towards the end.

 The plate of meat was for shabu-shabu, and then the other big plate was... dun dun duuuuuun... blowfish (hence the title of this post). I was terrified I was going to die. At least I would've died eating something delicious.

Here's me making my shabu-shabu. Everyone got their own thing to cook their very own. 

 That's some delicious sauce I dipped the pork in after I cooked it.

 This is eel (that's been mashed, I'm pretty sure). I wasn't a huge fan of this one.

 This is crab. Like, an entire crab.

 Yup, definitely a crab. And you can eat the whole thing! It was pretty good, actually, especially the legs.

 This was dessert. Some jelly thing with Kinako on it.

 And here's the rice. It wasn't white, but it was just as good.

If I hadn't done that in pictures, it would've taken an eternity to explain.

Here's the basic gist of what the room looked like. 

 It was all tatami and we got to sleep on futons that they kept in....

Those closets.

The next morning we all got up too early to eat breakfast. Somehow I was able to drag myself out of bed and put myself together for that. Not too sure how that happened.

Shortly after everyone finished breakfast, we were off to our first destination of the day: 地獄めぐり (Jigoku Meguri -- A bunch of natural onsens). The first onsen we looked at was called 血の池地獄 (Chi no Ike Jigoku -- Blood Pond Hell). Why is it called that? I'll tell you, friends, even though it's pretty obvious from the picture below. The clay in the pond is red! Didn't see that one coming, didja? Apparently (according to my pamphlet) the steam is supposed to be red too, but it wasn't.

I'm mad I can't teleport you all to the pond because the picture does it no justice. The steam stretch so high up it was surreal. And it smelled. So maybe you wouldn't want to be teleported.

Next up was a geiser.

I think it was somewhere around 105 degrees CELSIUS, it came every 30-60 minutes, and lasted about 6-10 minutes each time. The one that we saw was probably one of the longer ones. This one was called たつまき地獄 (Tatsumaki Jigoku).

Next up was 海地獄 (Umi Jigoku -- Ocean Hell). This place was very big on 鬼 (demons), so that's why all the names have to do with hell. Plus, they're all HOT.

Here's the Ocean one. Can't remember quite how hot this one was, but it was definitely too hot to touch or anything. It was so blue, though, that I kept finding myself tempted to jump it. This one smelled particularly bad...

This was the last one we saw (though there were more): 鬼石坊主地獄 (Not really sure how to translate  this one... The kanji mean: demon-stone-monk-lord/master-hell).

The pictures of this one don't do it justice. It was basically this thick-looking grey goo that was bubbling in certain spots. It was really fascinating to watch.

Lastly, there were a few animals on display. It was almost like a mini-zoo or something... The most interesting one, however, was this elephant.

There was a family there before us that was feeding it crackers. The kids would throw them (there was a fence to keep spectators far away enough from the elephant) to the elephant and she (or he... I'm calling it a she) would pick them up with her trunk. Typical elephant. But then if she couldn't reach the cracker, she'd let out a huge breath and blow the cracker back to the kids so that they could try throwing it again. Coolest thing of my life.

After seeing those four hot springs, we went to eat lunch at a restaurant called 西洋料理 (Western Cooking), even though it felt very much like an American Chinese restaurant.

Then we dropped my host father's family off at a train station and continued on our way home.

Our last sightseeing spot was a bridge in Aso (or near Aso... can't quite remember)... was this monstrosity:

I don't know how, but I wasn't afraid the entire time we crossed that thing. To give you perspective, they had a picture of the bridge and godzilla next to each other; the bridge was taller!

That's pretty much what happened to me this weekend. Leave it to my host family to come up with awesome places to sight see. I think they're planning on taking us to some monkey zoo soon... stay tuned for that, since from the sound of it, it sounds pretty interesting...

JFOKORFOEFKDSMLWELP
-Ellie