ひさしぶりね It's been a while

I haven't felt like blogging much lately. However, I have a free period at work (rarer these days) and some half-hearted motivation at the moment so here we go.

May 2nd through 6th I was off work in what is known in Japan as Golden Week. Golden Week is a series of national holidays in April (29 - Showa Day, the birthday of the emperor sometimes known as Hirohito) and May (3 - Constitution Day, 4 - Greenery Day, 5 - Children's Day). Since this year's Constitution Day fell on a Sunday, a 'make-up' holiday was given on Wednesday.

I celebrated with some light travel. Many people expect me to travel a lot, but really I don't. I came to live in Japan I guess, and I am not currently itching to go to Taiwan or Hong Kong or Australia or anything. I mean it would be nice to go to those places, but at the same time it's a lot cheaper for me to go places within Japan and I still have tons of fun.

Back to vacay. Vacation was great. I spend Saturday shopping at an outlet mall in Osaka, then Sunday visiting an ancient temple complex built into Mt. Hiei in Kyoto with my good friend from college Adrianne. Following that, me an 5 other friends booked it to Shirahama, Wakayama Prefecture for 3 days, 2 nights of...whatever we would find there.

The weather was not so wonderful, rained on and off, but we really made the most of it. Monday we got to Shirahama and after scoring some ramen, hung out on the beach for a while. For dinner, we ate some surprisingly tastey Japanese cuisine prepared in a hole in the wall by a lone Japanese man with a collection of tacky animal figurines on his shelves. Four of us then settled in for the night at our inn, and two of us...slept outside. In the rain.

The next morning, we had some Lawson's (a popular convenience store) for breakfast and then hung out at the beach some more. The weather was pretty awful, raining hardcore all morning, so we decided to check out some 温泉(onsen), hot springs, since that is the other thing Shirahama is famous for. We went to the nicest Onsen I have ever been to. There were multiple baths, and a few outdoor options. I think we spent nearly 4 hours there, with our schedule something like bathe, walk to a different tub and bathe some more, eat lunch, chill, bathe, rinse off, go home. It was great!! Of course, Japanese baths require you to be totally naked, so the girl portion of our crew (Raz and I) went one way, and the boys (Satoshi, Joe, Karl, and Dan) went the other.

After the onsen, Karl and Dan (the outdoor sleepers) decided that with all the rain we'd been having, they would head back early to Osaka. That left 4 of us on the beach, relaxing and enjoying the few moments of rainless cloudcover. Satoshi and I sampled the local microbrew (He got the Pale Ale, said it tasted like Sam Adams from the states. I tried the American Wheat, thought it resembled Shiner. We were both pretty happy since it tasted different from the many somewhat indistiguishable Japanese lagers.)

There was some fear of the rain starting up again, so we grabbed more convenience store food and went to eat dinner at the hotel. The next morning we got up fairly leisurely, made our travel plans back, and with 2 hours to spare decided to jump into the ocean despite the weather. I will say it was cold. But, I was also the only person who didn't shiver in the water. Joe ascribed it to me having extra padding. Oh Joe. Don't you understand women at all? I kid, I kid.

Back to work now. Tomorrow I get a cat!