Fukui and the Super Restaurant
On Saturday, I woke up at around 7:45 expecting my girlfriend to be over by 8. She was late... she finally got here by around 8:30ish and I was starving to death. She usually makes breakfast in the morning for us, so once we got into the kitchen she screamed super loud, and I was more or less frightened by her scream until I figured out what she was screaming about. There was this giant cock-a-roach climbing this pink wall I have in my kitchen behind my fridge (which I have gone to my apt co asking to have it removed). It was probably the biggest I've ever seen. Anyways, thusly ensewed a pokemon like battle with the behemoth. Needless to say we finally won. She tried to shake it off the wall a few times with no luck-- I had no cocroach spray so we were in a fold. I went to my bathroom and got the next-most potent formula I had lying around: "Kabi-Killer" (Mold Killer). I blasted him a couple times until he fell to the ground (making an audible sound). He then ran around a bit and had no place to go and tried to hide in the corner of my kitchen. I then sprayed the surrounding areas with the very strong smelling chemicals and when he tried to make an escape it was like watching someone run onto an ice rink with shoes at full boar. It was funny at first, but we weren't sure if he was just having trouble walking or if it had done the trick. We pretty much pronounced him dead and with the combination of dead roach and chemical spray in my kitchen we decided to go out to eat.
Anyways, it wasn't long before we hit the highway with a borrowed ETC card (miyuki lent me her's). We were on our way to Fukui-- an adventure that we had talked about for weeks in advance. It was our first real date, which is kinda sad considering we're going on two months now. Everytime I mentioned Fukui-ken, all I got was "what the hell are you gonna do there? There's nothin' to see". They were right in the same sense that tehre's nothing to see in Toyama! It was quite a trip. I made record time, as usual- I got there in about an hour (half-time... in music, you'd call it double time). So after realizing I was in Fukui, I turned to my girlfriend/navigator and asked when I should get off only to see her fixing up her makeup. I can only imagine the look of dissapointment on my face when I realize that we had missed the exit by 3 exits- about 20 miles. We promptly doubled back and got off at the correct exit and headed towards our first destination-- all hopes down the toilet considering all the foul and forboding warnings of Fukui I had received by my co-workers and friends alike.
Maruoka Castle-
I imagine it looks small in the picture- and not because it's a picture with a questionable ratio to the real life 2nd oldest castle in Japan. It was tiny... so small that it was worth laughing about. It having been the main attraction for us and Fukui-ken, things were looking grim in terms of sight-seeing, but we were happy just to spend the time together. We also got some Soba Ice Cream (Fukui is famous for, among other things, soba).
Our next destination was Eiheiji temple-
We took quite a drive to get there and decided it would be a better choice than Tojimbo (the really steep cliff which is famous in Japan for people jumping off of to kill themselves).
On our way there I was attracted by a sign that basically said "bamboo people". In retrospect, it was quite a tourist trap, not unlike the dinos on the way to palm springs. It was great though! We got out of my car and there was this big round man and his team of two younger men who greeted us and invited us to join in a nagashi-chazoba tebehoudai (all you can eat handmade tea flavoured soba running down a bamboo waterslide thing) for 500yen! It wasn't something we could possibly turn down. Our timing was impecible and it was something that seemed more like fate than an option. We joined and got the middle seat on the bamboo-- we were flanked by a group of old women who I frankly felt sorry for because I figured they were gonna have some trouble competing against us-- quite younger than them, and our right flank, the two young boys and their mother. We were warned that it was going to start and the group of older women stood up and got in a stance. They let the first 4 or 5 things of soba down the shoot and then they started going at it. The lady closest to us had god-hands, as my girlfriend put it. She was absolutely amazing... I've never seen someone SO good at chopsticks before in my life. Her worst miss was letting one piece of soba go... this is not an easy task!
Here's a quick look at part of the setup.
So yea- it was a 30 minute deal so everyone got plenty to eat despite the old woman's god-graced skill. We then decided to see what all the hooplah about the place was. It was basically a place where craftsman would make people or animal figures out of bamboo. I suppose I should've made more of an effort to take pictures of the stuff inside as that was the main part of this place, but as it is I just enjoyed it without my camera... some of the dolls were arguably creepy with their flowing bamboo hair and face-less-faces.
Here's a picture of a big statue outside and the path to the indoors of the establishment:
At the gift shop I was being an ass as usual and I asked someone "do you guys even have bamboo ice cream??" in a child-like voice only to be happily answered "yea! we do!!!". Then Miya and I got a 10 minute explination on the process of making such an ice cream. I love stuff like that so much! It was actually really good and tasted suspisciously like green tea ice cream (but it was quite different).
Anyhow, we were now on our way to destination-dos. The parking situation was a serious hinderance on the experience- though it was another thing to laugh about. The second we rounded the corner and went up the slanted road to the temple there were people literally begging us to park in their parking lots... if Miya wasn't there I would've mistaken them for people being friendly asking me to park in their area for free or something--even other Japanese people were being had by these guys... in no other place in Japan had I seen people so rude like that... I've decided that I will call the buddhist priest filled office (which we decided would've been too rude to take a picture of) and tell them about it sometime in the near future. Anyways, the place was beautiful! It was easily the main attraction of Fukui. The introduction to the tour was funny as the monk giving the explination of things in a dead pan voice would say when new comers arrived (with varying levels of tardiness): "Please come in, be quiet, sit on your knees, and pray quietly." He said this mid-sentence about 8 or 9 times. It was a really really beautiful temple and was WAY older than the castle which boasts itself as being the second oldest castle of the Japans. It had it beat by some 350 years!
There was an old man praying to this statue for only buddha knows how long...
The next place we wanted to go was to a beach called "Diamond Beach" (Sunset Beach was on the way there, btw). The pamphlet showed hawaii/paradise like waters which is something I had always thought to be in league with Dinosaurs-- it just doesn't exist (especially not in Fukui ken of all places!). So we drove there, it was about an hour drive. Miya said that the beach to our left was it- we had finally arrived. I looked at the water and decided that it was indeed a myth. We kinda just stood out there for a bit and I was quite dissapointed. Miya had to go to the bathroom, so we went inside of the convenience store to ask about the beach and where the bathroom was. She said it was right outside next to the playground; the bathroom, that is. Anyways, the beach was down the road, and she said "you're talking about that really beautiful hawaii-like beach, right? It was 5 minutes down the road, so we took off and skipped out on paying the $10 parking fee. 5 minutes of driving and lo-and-behold this:
I'm not kidding-- we went from some of the grayest beach water I have ever seen to this in all but five minutes! It was great. We then decided to buy some (overpriced) tubes. I bargained them down about a dollar each-- making them only $25 each. After the $15 parking lot fee, it was the least I could do! But yea, it was SO nice. Even though it was completely cloudy, it was still beautiful. Up until about 15 minutes before we got to that area it was absolutely pouring rain-- it cleared up just for that time at the beach!
After that we headed towards our final destination-- the renowed dinosaur museum of Fukui. The pamphlet we got said it was gonna be open till 8:30... we got there at about 5:15. It was eerily empty in the parking lot and the entrance was quite dark. Convinced that's just how they rolled at dino-museums, we went all the way to the door in disbelief of the inevitable. We then asked an employee who had been walking around the front area to be told that they closed at 5 and that sometime in august they stay open until around 9ish... it was quite sad considering the distance we had traversed. We had our fun, nevertheless. There were plenty of stupid dinosaur statues to climb upon and ride (those pictures are on Miya's camera). There was also a giant dino-slide that I went down.
After that, we headed back home in hopes of eating crab in the crab-famous Fukui. We asked a gas station employee near the dino museum if he knew of any crab in the area-- he had no clue... we then asked if he knew of anything good. He said after about a 3 and a half second akward pause-- 'we've got soba! So we just searched on the roads back to the highway and didn't find any. Miya had some kinda drinking party (which she didn't drink at) for her work. She always gets invited to these things~ anyways, we went back home with that in mind. On the highway near Kanazawa, we could see a HUGE fireworks show-- it was really beautiful. Luckily Miya drove on the way back because I was completely exhausted. We got home and she went to her thing and I went to bed.
----
Yesterday was also quite fun. We woke up early and went to Tonami's Cultural Hall. We saw Shosei's brass band perform there along with all of the other prefectural finalists. It was very very nice to hear music like that for so cheap. They might be middle schoolers, but some of them are really talented! After that, we went to go get some lunch. We went to the convenience store to see if there would be any magazines that would steer us in the right direction to some nice places to eat. There was nota-thing there... so we hopped in her car and we were gonna go searching just by driving and looking but she decided to search with her navigation. We just kinda went randomly and we looked at a list of Kanji that I couldn't read very well and just pointed and said: "That one!", she read it to me... and I decided it wasn't that good sounding, so I said, "No, this one!". So we went there. It was the absolute LAST place you would find. Not only was it in the middle of nowehre, but it wasn't even on the side of the road. THere was a little parking lot next to a rundown building, and then a path that was about 200m long going down to where the restaurant was. On our way down the path, a lady was there to greet us and asked what we were doing there-- she asked if we were there for the Onsen or to eat. We said we were looking to eat and she kinda looked puzzled and invited us in. She asked us who told us about her place. We just said we searched on our navigation and found her place. She asked what we put in-- we said sushi. She said "WHAT?" then Miya said "Japanese food!" The lady was content with that it seemed and lead us to where we would eat. It seemed more like a Ryokan than a restaurant. Anyways, it was SUPER traditional. The man has to sit on one side and the woman on the other-kind-of-traditional. The lady's head poked out from around the corner and she said it was gonna be 6000 yen each. Both of us having shocked looks on our faces, she said she would do it for 5000. It was expensive, but we went for it. There was no menu, the food changed with the seasons, she said. It came one by one-- it was a course meal. Everything was SUPER fresh. It's like you've never eaten until you've had food like this. We were both completely full by the end, too-- it's none of that super tiny stuff that you see on the TV for expensive food. Anyways, that was about an hour. Then we were invited to follow her. She told us that we could also sing there- like Karaoke. It was less and less like Karaoke the closer we got, which was funny. By the end we found out it was just an open room with no microphone or anything, and upon entering we saw a small boom-box that she had trouble operating (and couldn't say CD-- even as Japanese say it; she was so old school she couldn't pronounce Dee (she said it like Day)). Her husband walked in and she said he was gonna sing for us and asked us politely to sit down. We sat down and asked if he would sing for us. He said he's only been singing for 2 years and then showed us a book he would be singing from. They were apparently traditional Japanese songs that you learn in elementary school in Japan. He sang a few for us, and then they left the two of us in there to sing. We sang a couple (mostly Miya as I had no idea what the melodies are). We had a small bucket with towels in it and when we left the room they said we could go to their onsen. We told them we didn't have any idea where it was so the husband, after giving a grasshopper on a leaf creation to Miya, showed us the way to their onsen. (they actually had a little handmade guidebook of their place in the karaoke room). On our way to the parking lot, we saw a handwritten sign outside of the room we were just in and it read "music room". It was so beautiful~ so we followed him up the road about a mile to his onsen. Then he told us when we're done to just leave the towels there and thanked us-- we thanked him! We looked around the place-- it was wonderful. There was like a meeting room thing. There was a small rock garden with a really cool tree in the middle. Then there was this bus that they had told us about. They said we could go in the bus and relax if we wanted to. I had no idea why I would want to relax in a bux- but once I saw it and saw the tatami and chairs inside it was all quite clear. So we went up the stairs next to the bus and saw a beautiful view of the dam as well as the surrounding area. We got in the Onsen on the top of this vantage point and just relaxed for like 30 minutes. We even took a little drink of the onsen water as advised by the husband. It was terrible, maybe worse than we expected, but it was all part of the package. It was SO great. It is all like a dream~ after we were done we both wanted to eat ice cream and I wanted to go for a drive, so we went a little further south through the mountains and went almost all the way to the next town-- called Toga. There was this little stop with a giant plastic ice cream cone. We pulled over and they had it-- Toga Soba Ice Cream.
We relaxed there a bit, drove home and then slept and slept. We probably went to sleep at like 8 and woke up at around 9 this morning. Anyways, it was a super great time. That was it... it was like 10 weekends in one.
-----
Please Enjoy this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVFsJKaBFDA&feature=related
Anyways, it wasn't long before we hit the highway with a borrowed ETC card (miyuki lent me her's). We were on our way to Fukui-- an adventure that we had talked about for weeks in advance. It was our first real date, which is kinda sad considering we're going on two months now. Everytime I mentioned Fukui-ken, all I got was "what the hell are you gonna do there? There's nothin' to see". They were right in the same sense that tehre's nothing to see in Toyama! It was quite a trip. I made record time, as usual- I got there in about an hour (half-time... in music, you'd call it double time). So after realizing I was in Fukui, I turned to my girlfriend/navigator and asked when I should get off only to see her fixing up her makeup. I can only imagine the look of dissapointment on my face when I realize that we had missed the exit by 3 exits- about 20 miles. We promptly doubled back and got off at the correct exit and headed towards our first destination-- all hopes down the toilet considering all the foul and forboding warnings of Fukui I had received by my co-workers and friends alike.
Maruoka Castle-
I imagine it looks small in the picture- and not because it's a picture with a questionable ratio to the real life 2nd oldest castle in Japan. It was tiny... so small that it was worth laughing about. It having been the main attraction for us and Fukui-ken, things were looking grim in terms of sight-seeing, but we were happy just to spend the time together. We also got some Soba Ice Cream (Fukui is famous for, among other things, soba).
Our next destination was Eiheiji temple-
We took quite a drive to get there and decided it would be a better choice than Tojimbo (the really steep cliff which is famous in Japan for people jumping off of to kill themselves).
On our way there I was attracted by a sign that basically said "bamboo people". In retrospect, it was quite a tourist trap, not unlike the dinos on the way to palm springs. It was great though! We got out of my car and there was this big round man and his team of two younger men who greeted us and invited us to join in a nagashi-chazoba tebehoudai (all you can eat handmade tea flavoured soba running down a bamboo waterslide thing) for 500yen! It wasn't something we could possibly turn down. Our timing was impecible and it was something that seemed more like fate than an option. We joined and got the middle seat on the bamboo-- we were flanked by a group of old women who I frankly felt sorry for because I figured they were gonna have some trouble competing against us-- quite younger than them, and our right flank, the two young boys and their mother. We were warned that it was going to start and the group of older women stood up and got in a stance. They let the first 4 or 5 things of soba down the shoot and then they started going at it. The lady closest to us had god-hands, as my girlfriend put it. She was absolutely amazing... I've never seen someone SO good at chopsticks before in my life. Her worst miss was letting one piece of soba go... this is not an easy task!
Here's a quick look at part of the setup.
So yea- it was a 30 minute deal so everyone got plenty to eat despite the old woman's god-graced skill. We then decided to see what all the hooplah about the place was. It was basically a place where craftsman would make people or animal figures out of bamboo. I suppose I should've made more of an effort to take pictures of the stuff inside as that was the main part of this place, but as it is I just enjoyed it without my camera... some of the dolls were arguably creepy with their flowing bamboo hair and face-less-faces.
Here's a picture of a big statue outside and the path to the indoors of the establishment:
At the gift shop I was being an ass as usual and I asked someone "do you guys even have bamboo ice cream??" in a child-like voice only to be happily answered "yea! we do!!!". Then Miya and I got a 10 minute explination on the process of making such an ice cream. I love stuff like that so much! It was actually really good and tasted suspisciously like green tea ice cream (but it was quite different).
Anyhow, we were now on our way to destination-dos. The parking situation was a serious hinderance on the experience- though it was another thing to laugh about. The second we rounded the corner and went up the slanted road to the temple there were people literally begging us to park in their parking lots... if Miya wasn't there I would've mistaken them for people being friendly asking me to park in their area for free or something--even other Japanese people were being had by these guys... in no other place in Japan had I seen people so rude like that... I've decided that I will call the buddhist priest filled office (which we decided would've been too rude to take a picture of) and tell them about it sometime in the near future. Anyways, the place was beautiful! It was easily the main attraction of Fukui. The introduction to the tour was funny as the monk giving the explination of things in a dead pan voice would say when new comers arrived (with varying levels of tardiness): "Please come in, be quiet, sit on your knees, and pray quietly." He said this mid-sentence about 8 or 9 times. It was a really really beautiful temple and was WAY older than the castle which boasts itself as being the second oldest castle of the Japans. It had it beat by some 350 years!
There was an old man praying to this statue for only buddha knows how long...
The next place we wanted to go was to a beach called "Diamond Beach" (Sunset Beach was on the way there, btw). The pamphlet showed hawaii/paradise like waters which is something I had always thought to be in league with Dinosaurs-- it just doesn't exist (especially not in Fukui ken of all places!). So we drove there, it was about an hour drive. Miya said that the beach to our left was it- we had finally arrived. I looked at the water and decided that it was indeed a myth. We kinda just stood out there for a bit and I was quite dissapointed. Miya had to go to the bathroom, so we went inside of the convenience store to ask about the beach and where the bathroom was. She said it was right outside next to the playground; the bathroom, that is. Anyways, the beach was down the road, and she said "you're talking about that really beautiful hawaii-like beach, right? It was 5 minutes down the road, so we took off and skipped out on paying the $10 parking fee. 5 minutes of driving and lo-and-behold this:
I'm not kidding-- we went from some of the grayest beach water I have ever seen to this in all but five minutes! It was great. We then decided to buy some (overpriced) tubes. I bargained them down about a dollar each-- making them only $25 each. After the $15 parking lot fee, it was the least I could do! But yea, it was SO nice. Even though it was completely cloudy, it was still beautiful. Up until about 15 minutes before we got to that area it was absolutely pouring rain-- it cleared up just for that time at the beach!
After that we headed towards our final destination-- the renowed dinosaur museum of Fukui. The pamphlet we got said it was gonna be open till 8:30... we got there at about 5:15. It was eerily empty in the parking lot and the entrance was quite dark. Convinced that's just how they rolled at dino-museums, we went all the way to the door in disbelief of the inevitable. We then asked an employee who had been walking around the front area to be told that they closed at 5 and that sometime in august they stay open until around 9ish... it was quite sad considering the distance we had traversed. We had our fun, nevertheless. There were plenty of stupid dinosaur statues to climb upon and ride (those pictures are on Miya's camera). There was also a giant dino-slide that I went down.
After that, we headed back home in hopes of eating crab in the crab-famous Fukui. We asked a gas station employee near the dino museum if he knew of any crab in the area-- he had no clue... we then asked if he knew of anything good. He said after about a 3 and a half second akward pause-- 'we've got soba! So we just searched on the roads back to the highway and didn't find any. Miya had some kinda drinking party (which she didn't drink at) for her work. She always gets invited to these things~ anyways, we went back home with that in mind. On the highway near Kanazawa, we could see a HUGE fireworks show-- it was really beautiful. Luckily Miya drove on the way back because I was completely exhausted. We got home and she went to her thing and I went to bed.
----
Yesterday was also quite fun. We woke up early and went to Tonami's Cultural Hall. We saw Shosei's brass band perform there along with all of the other prefectural finalists. It was very very nice to hear music like that for so cheap. They might be middle schoolers, but some of them are really talented! After that, we went to go get some lunch. We went to the convenience store to see if there would be any magazines that would steer us in the right direction to some nice places to eat. There was nota-thing there... so we hopped in her car and we were gonna go searching just by driving and looking but she decided to search with her navigation. We just kinda went randomly and we looked at a list of Kanji that I couldn't read very well and just pointed and said: "That one!", she read it to me... and I decided it wasn't that good sounding, so I said, "No, this one!". So we went there. It was the absolute LAST place you would find. Not only was it in the middle of nowehre, but it wasn't even on the side of the road. THere was a little parking lot next to a rundown building, and then a path that was about 200m long going down to where the restaurant was. On our way down the path, a lady was there to greet us and asked what we were doing there-- she asked if we were there for the Onsen or to eat. We said we were looking to eat and she kinda looked puzzled and invited us in. She asked us who told us about her place. We just said we searched on our navigation and found her place. She asked what we put in-- we said sushi. She said "WHAT?" then Miya said "Japanese food!" The lady was content with that it seemed and lead us to where we would eat. It seemed more like a Ryokan than a restaurant. Anyways, it was SUPER traditional. The man has to sit on one side and the woman on the other-kind-of-traditional. The lady's head poked out from around the corner and she said it was gonna be 6000 yen each. Both of us having shocked looks on our faces, she said she would do it for 5000. It was expensive, but we went for it. There was no menu, the food changed with the seasons, she said. It came one by one-- it was a course meal. Everything was SUPER fresh. It's like you've never eaten until you've had food like this. We were both completely full by the end, too-- it's none of that super tiny stuff that you see on the TV for expensive food. Anyways, that was about an hour. Then we were invited to follow her. She told us that we could also sing there- like Karaoke. It was less and less like Karaoke the closer we got, which was funny. By the end we found out it was just an open room with no microphone or anything, and upon entering we saw a small boom-box that she had trouble operating (and couldn't say CD-- even as Japanese say it; she was so old school she couldn't pronounce Dee (she said it like Day)). Her husband walked in and she said he was gonna sing for us and asked us politely to sit down. We sat down and asked if he would sing for us. He said he's only been singing for 2 years and then showed us a book he would be singing from. They were apparently traditional Japanese songs that you learn in elementary school in Japan. He sang a few for us, and then they left the two of us in there to sing. We sang a couple (mostly Miya as I had no idea what the melodies are). We had a small bucket with towels in it and when we left the room they said we could go to their onsen. We told them we didn't have any idea where it was so the husband, after giving a grasshopper on a leaf creation to Miya, showed us the way to their onsen. (they actually had a little handmade guidebook of their place in the karaoke room). On our way to the parking lot, we saw a handwritten sign outside of the room we were just in and it read "music room". It was so beautiful~ so we followed him up the road about a mile to his onsen. Then he told us when we're done to just leave the towels there and thanked us-- we thanked him! We looked around the place-- it was wonderful. There was like a meeting room thing. There was a small rock garden with a really cool tree in the middle. Then there was this bus that they had told us about. They said we could go in the bus and relax if we wanted to. I had no idea why I would want to relax in a bux- but once I saw it and saw the tatami and chairs inside it was all quite clear. So we went up the stairs next to the bus and saw a beautiful view of the dam as well as the surrounding area. We got in the Onsen on the top of this vantage point and just relaxed for like 30 minutes. We even took a little drink of the onsen water as advised by the husband. It was terrible, maybe worse than we expected, but it was all part of the package. It was SO great. It is all like a dream~ after we were done we both wanted to eat ice cream and I wanted to go for a drive, so we went a little further south through the mountains and went almost all the way to the next town-- called Toga. There was this little stop with a giant plastic ice cream cone. We pulled over and they had it-- Toga Soba Ice Cream.
We relaxed there a bit, drove home and then slept and slept. We probably went to sleep at like 8 and woke up at around 9 this morning. Anyways, it was a super great time. That was it... it was like 10 weekends in one.
-----
Please Enjoy this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVFsJKaBFDA&feature=related