This weekend, I decided it was time to get away from the crazy city that is Tokyo. I and a group of 25 kids from Temple went to Hakone for two days. This trip was absolutely amazing! We woke up early Saturday morning (it was hard, but worth it) and drove a bus about two hours outside of Tokyo to reach Hakone. Once there, we ate at a soba shop and visited a small temple. From there, we rolled out to the Open Air Museum. For those of you that don't know, this place is like any other museum with tons of artwork-except everything is outside. On a beautiful Saturday afternoon, I frolicked, fed fish, climbed a tower, rode a horse and posed for many funny pictures. In essence, this place was a big playground for big five-year-olds like me. There were some places I wasn't permitted to enter because I'm not actually a child. If I weren't so large, I probably would have entered anyway.
After my childhood flashback at the museum, we took a ride on a gondola to view Mt. Fuji. Let me tell you that this mountain is very large and majestic. It may even be too much for Bob Sapp to handle. While on the gondola, we took pictures of Fuji-san, the sulfur mines that were directly below us (which didn't smell so good in all honesty), and random people that were passing us in their gondolas. I got this one Japanese lady to dance like me as she passed by. She had some skills.
Finally, to end the night, we arrived at our hotel. After finding rooms, we feasted on meat, fish, pork, crabs and other things that I didn't really know about. Needless to say, it was a step or two above Val.
After dinner came a bout of karaoke. We were joined by a slightly tipsy Japanese man. He found our American songs very amusing. The greatest part of the night had to be the onsen. I must say that sitting outside at night in a natural hot spring could be the most relaxing thing I've done in my life. High school hot tub parties definitely have nothing on this. What made it more interesting was a couple Japanese dudes we chilled with. After group bonding in the onsen, we passed out to get ready for another wonderful day.
On Sunday we visited castles and temples. We roamed around this one castle and marvelled at its many attractions. For some reason, they had mad birds and monkeys and even an elephant there. The elephant looked really, really unhappy, which made me sad. However, the samurai costume I dressed up in made me very happy. Look for pictures on Facebook. There may even be a video of a dancing black samurai on YouTube sometime soon.
Our last stop was a temple. This one really stood out among the many we've been to. Not only was it extremely beautiful there, it also had a lot of damn steps. We walked up around 200 steps to reach the final stairway. The last one had 216 consecutive steps. Why did I go up the stairs once, go back down, and the go back up again two steps at a time? Guess this was the only way I could get my spring training in for that day. Needless to say, I was pretty tired but extremely happy with the whole thing.
We finally left rural Japan and headed back towards the bright city lights. This weekend was the first time that I really felt I was in another country. I can't wait to have more experiences like it.
Until next time,
Black Samurai