Bandai-Atami

This week Suzie and Ian came to visit. They were delayed on their flight, but it never occurred to me to check, and we had arranged to meet them at a station here in the city after their train ride. Unfortunately they missed that train, so we walked around the platform for a while and eventually concluded they weren't there. We called Mary to check the times for us and figured out what must have happened, so made use of the hour til the next train by going for a nice lunch set above the station (I'm not being sarcastic, it was in the station and it was still very nice!) When they got in, we made our way back before going for ramen and a drink at the stand-up bar in Hiroo. The next day we were at work, but Suzie has travelled a lot and they just went off and explored - they have seen quite a few things we haven't got round to yet!

It was a 3 day week for us as we had the long weekend for mid-term. This meant we were free to have a bigger than usual Wednesday night out at Doma Doma - all 15 of us - and still not worry about being tired. This said, we got up at 5.30 the next day to visit Tsukiji fish market. It's the biggest fish market in the world and it was incredible, just huge! We caught the end of the tuna auctions (very loud, lots of over-exaggerated movements, just like a normal auction only even harder to follow in Japanese) and had a good look around, before going for a sushi breakfast at a restaurant recommended by fish boy (his name is Alastair but no-one ever calls him that, he has a PhD in tuna and works at the market) which was fantastic. We all had reservations about eating raw fish at 8am but we soon got past that and really enjoyed it. It could have had something to do with the fact that we had already been up for ages by then and it felt like lunch time!

Later that day Suzie and Ian left for Takayama and Kyoto, and we started to ring around for places that we could go away for a few days (nothing like leaving it to the last minute). We wanted to go somewhere new, and find a Ryokan (traditional style Japanese inn) but with an Onsen in the room because Will is shy. We found one we liked the look of that still had space in a small hot spring resort called Bandai Atami. It is in the hills near the shores of one of the most beautiful lakes in Japan, in Fukushima prefecture north of Tokyo, so we hired a car and set off on Friday morning. The rain was horrible all day, and by the time we got there (after getting lost a few times on the way) it was 2.30pm. We had been planning to go up to the lake, but we decided to save that for Saturday and just went to the room.

It was amazing. We had our own little garden with an onsen on a deck just under cover, so I had a hot bath outside while it rained and was all quiet. It was so relaxing and peaceful. I must have had 6 baths in 2 days! We had our evening meal served to us in the room, and the women kept getting on their knees to bow to us fully with heads touching the ground. We felt quite embarrassed really, standing there in our scratty jeans after a 5 hour drive! They got us to choose yukata from a table, and just went out of their way to make us feel special for the whole time we were there. It was the first time we had stayed at a real ryokan, and I would highly recommend it!

The next day we set off to drive around the lake, but the rain was still torrential. The views were still good but we didn't see much through the mist. We drove down through some pretty areas just to see more of Japan outside of Tokyo, and we came across a small sign with the name of a village I happened to have been reading about before, a very old preserved traditional Japanese village called Ouchijuku. It is a really popular place to go, but you would never guess it from the single tiny signpost, we were lucky to spot it. We queued for almost an hour just to park, and I have never seen so many people in one place. Or so many umbrellas for that matter! The rain just poured and poured, and we were soaked through long before we reached the first shop selling umbrellas. The village was lovely, all thatched roofs and old tatami mat rooms which had been kept just as they would have been, and trench streams in the streets with washing places and water wheels. On a sunny day it would have been perfect. For lunch we went to an open tatami room with a pit in the floor where they cooked fish over an open fire. We had a tempura set, with soup and rice and it was nice, but tempura is usually really light and not greasy. This was the opposite, and really sickly. We were still wet when we left, so we headed back to the car.

The drive home was very long, because some roads were closed due to the weather. The rain kept getting heavier and the wind got up, so on the expressway we could barely see the lane lines. We found out later when we got back that it was a typhoon which had changed course unexpectedly and hit the east coast of Japan. We thought it was bad enough to drive home in it, but we found out that our friends Kate and Adam had decided to go away on their scooter, with her perched on the back. They had a five hour drive home on a scooter in a typhoon. They said other people were laughing at them because they looked so ridiculous and were obviously mad foreigners, but they couldn't join in because their faces were numb.

The day after a typhoon here is always so calm and sunny, perfect days after the worst you get. Sunday was like that, and everyone just relaxed and unwound ready for school again on Monday.