Okutama
Taka and I were advised by Taka's sister to go to the west side of Tokyo to see the leaves changing their colours. It took around 2 and a half hours on the train.
It was a national holiday (labour thanks giving day) on that Friday as well so the timing couldn't have been better. I mean, who would really want to go hiking in Tokyo? As people who lived in Japan would understand, trying to book anywhere in Japan during national holidays unless you book it a couple of months in advanced is next to impossible. So we settled for a less popular place.
Just a note, I got a little hand made present from the third grade kids at one of my schools for labour thanks giving day. It was a sash with all their messages attached. It was so cute and it made me feel like my efforts has paid off.
We got to a place called Kori and we decided to taking the hiking course, which ends 3 train stations away from our station. We started walking really slowly admiring the colourful mountains, which were painted over by yellow, red and orange leaves from various trees. We climbed up to this hidden shrine, which requires you to get geared up for hiking, because you had to take probably about thousand steps to get there. I almost expected to see Totoro or a weird monster from Spirited Away. Taka thought the place was creepy though and started scaring me by saying that we may actually be spirited away... (kamikakushi).
The hike took us about 4 hours. High mountains with very few people living around. We couldn't believe that this was still infact,a part of Tokyo.
The contrast was shocking even for Taka as well. We were too tired to take the train back to Yokohama so we decided to spend a night at a Ryokan (Japanese style hotel), which had hotsprings. Our trip to the hotel was quite interesting though. We noticed one thing about people who live in the mountains. They don't like customers. Taka and I found these people extremely funny for their lack of good services and frankly, their extreme rudeness from our point of view. But it just didn't become funny anymore when we hiked another 3 hours the next morning heading our way back to a train station. We got quite hungry so we went to a very small and well-hidden soba place. The waitress (a very old woman) made us stand there until we were seated for about 5minutes, she forgot to bring the chopsticks, I asked her for some green tea (as it's customary to have green tea or some kind of cold beverage in the summer brought to us before and after we eat) twice. The worst thing was that she didn't even apologise. Soba was delicious though. In the end, we went to the cashier to pay for our food and to our surprise (nb sarcasm) she made us wait again. When we got our money out of our wallet, she said "hurry!" in a very dubious tone. Taka dropped 1000 yen on the floor and the woman just said "Pick it up". Gosh, she was unbelievable. I wanted to laugh at her, but I was more angry at her! I regret not saying anything to her.
The next day, Taka and I went to get another cell phone together. So now we have two! Uuuuuhhh how trendy am I?