road trip!

[danamite00]

I love road trips... I dont always like the driving but I love the adventure.. My friend Denise and I set out on Wednesday morning on what ended up being an almost 800km road trip. We drove all the way through our Prefecture (basically a state) out to Niigata... which is where the REALLY bad earthquake hit last year. There we stopped at this little festival that a girl in my conversation class had told me about. It was in celebration of this old folklore about a fox bride a groom so it was like their wedding party. During the day people walk around to little vendors and eat yummy festival food and get their faces painted like foxes.. EVERYONE in the town had fox faces, even the guy at the toll booth. SO Denise and i both got our faces painted which was fun but we didnt realize that this would mean every two seconds someone would ask to take a picture with the "token foreigners with fox faces" haha.. it was all in good fun though. THis one woman with a reeeeallly nice camera even did like a photo shoot with us haha

Then we headed out to Sado Island... which is in the Sea of Japan (on the west coast) about 22km from mainland Japan. We took a car ferry out there which meant my little Ari chan (my car) could come with us to explore. The island was small enough that we drove around half of it our first day there and luckily found lodging despite this week being a busy season. We also go to pan for gold at a gold mine and were so excited to find our three or four flakes each.

I will post more later.. gotta get back to the grind!