www.hakkodapowder.com 

 I found a pretty nifty site all about skiing and snowboarding here in northern Japan.   It’s run by this guy who offers guiding services up in the Hakkoda mountains.  The Hakkoda’s are up here in Aomori Prefecture, and are a pretty big mountain range.  They’re very popular to ski/snowboard at but I’ve been hesitant to try them myself as I’m a very inexperienced boarder.  Last year some time I got to take the ropeway up to the top of the mountain and look around during a tour.  It was a really nice view, and you could see Aomori city and the bay it’s on from the top.  I’ve also seen some tours that do hiking trips through the mountains there, and I’m interested in going on one.  I’m gonna have to keep an eye out for one that’s offered as I really don’t like having to drive all the way there cause it’s 2-3hr drive up and back and then I’d be walking around too so I’d be tired driving back.  While taking a bus tour can be a little annoying, it’s cheap and relaxing for the most part.

Oh, I also found the link to the official Hakkoda Ropeway site: http://www.hakkoda-ropeway.jp/  Now I really want to go hiking there ^^  It looks so pretty.

Oh, the hakkodapowder has a bunch of info on festivals up here in the Aomori prefecture too!  He actually wrote about several I haven’t gone to yet, but I too hope soon.  Not this coming weekend, but the next is a fireworks festival out at Lake Towada, and I’m itching to go.  Lake Towada is K and mine’s favorite place to go for a nice relaxing day.

Matsushima

Saturday K and I took a tour to Matsushima bay in Miyagi Prefecture. That’s actually 2 Prefectures south of the one we’re currently living in, which is Aomori Prefecture. It was quite a long bus ride (4hrs) but well worth it, we both agree it was the best tour we’ve been on so far. The first place we visited was the Marinepia aquarium, we arrived just in time to catch the seal show for that hour. Seal shows are so much fun ^^ The seals names were Andy, Asuka, Noi and Ruthy.  I love all the cute stuff they have them do, they played volleyball 2 on 2, had a race with each other, and a bunch of other fun stuff.

Then we walked around the aquarium and got to see all sorts of awesome sea creatures. They had this giant manta ray that’s wing span was bigger then my arm span! It was freak’n huge! They also had a shark tank, an otter, penguins, electric eels, and hundreds of other things. I have trouble turning off the flash on my camera so I didn’t risk taking any pictures while we were in that area.

After there we headed over to the Zuiganji Temple. Right after the gate into the temple complex is a stand of sugi trees and these wall of caves dug into a rock face that house stone tablets and Buddhist sculptures, many of which were of Kannon. Kannon is known as the Goddess of Mercy and is a very prevalent Buddhist deity. These caves are pretty cool looking, and the statues look very old. The complex itself contains several buildings, the main one being the Temple itself, but there is a nice museum that they built next to the temple containing many Buddhist relics as well as Date Masamune’s armor and a life sized replica of him. Masamune is known as being a great military leader as well as a devout Buddhist. He had the Zuiganji temple rebuilt in 1609 and also founded the city of Sendai, which is now the capital of Miyagi Prefecture. He’s a pretty fearsome looking guy, he had an enormous crescent on his helmet, but it’s kind of funny, the mascot for Matsushima/Masamune is of a cute onigiri with the crescent on his forehead. XD I wonder what he’d think of it as the mascot representation of him?

The temple contains many beautiful paintings on sliding doors and hanging wall scrolls. I picked up a nice book with pictures of artwork since you can’t take any pictures inside the temple. There are some amazing wooden carvings decorating the temple too.

After that we wandered around the city for a bit, got some food and headed to this little island connected to the main land by a little red bridge. There are actually several islands connected that way but we only got to see 2 while we were there. The third one was connected by this incredibly long bridge and if I remember correctly has more Buddhist temples on it, but we didn’t have time to get over there. The island that we did get to that we liked the most was Oshima, and it had dozens of really old sculptures and more caves dug into the rock walls. It was incredible, like walking into history. It wasn’t a really big island either, but it had paths going everywhere, many of which were just the rock of the island worn down by thousands of people over the centuries. There was even a tunnel dug through the rock.

The last thing we did was take a boat cruise around the bay where we got to see dozens of the islands that Matsushima is famous for. A lot had really interesting histories, like this one that legend has it Masamune used to have midnight parties on this one island, and another was where retired horses were sent to live out the rest of their life in peace.

I signed this post up for the SanrioTown Travel the World event - http://blog.hellokitty.com/traveltheworld

Next weekend K and I are going on another tour, yay! But other then that not much is up between school and work. Oh, I figured out I have 88 credits completed, so that leaves 32, so technically I only need 10 or so more classes till I’m done with my degree. Buuut, I think some of them aren’t usable for the degree program I’m in here >< I’m still working on finding out how many more classes I officially need. At most I’m thinking 20 classes, but I sure hope not XD

Here’s some random pics of stuff I picked recently that I finally got around to photographing XD

This one is a hand towel I picked up in a gift shop when we went to Hiraizumi.

This is a Koi-nobori. Koi-nobori are flown around the middle to end of April till May 5th, the 5th is Children’s Day, but used to be known as Boy’s Day. The koi-nobori are flown in hopes of that the boys in the household will grow up strong and healthy. -wikipedia, Koi-nobori

Mine aren’t near as big as the real ones get, I got mine at a store in the mall on the pinwheel, inside the tube that the pinwheel is on was filled with little rock candies. I’m guessing you buy them as presents for boys on Children’s Day because not a lot of houses put up the large ones. Also a lot of people live in apartments now a days so they really don’t have anywhere to put them up.

These are gashapon machines in a local mall. I wrote about them in an earlier post More Random Stuff. This is just a small section of the area they’re in, and some places have rows and rows and walls lined with the machines.

I was at work this morning (on a Saturday) and a little before 9 I felt the biggest earthquake I’ve felt since I got here.  It kept going on and on for 2 or so minutes and it turns out it was a 7.0.  I’m not sure exactly how far away it was but I’m guessing around 150-200 kilometers (100ish miles) south of here according to the maps.   I hope everyone is ok there.

A co-worker mentioned this site: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqcenter/recenteqsww/Quakes/us2008tgah.php

Pretty cool site that updates every hour with worldwide seismic activity.

I was at the mall near here today and I saw his DS game that comes with a stylus made to look like a calligraphy brush. I’d seen it on the shelves for a while, but hadn’t remember to take a picture till now XD I looked it up on amazon.jp if you wanna take a look. As far as I can tell it’s to teach proper brush strokes for kanji characters. While to us westerners it may not seem that the order in which you write Japanese characters would matter, it is important because that is how they are written. Once you get to know hiragana and katakana you actually become aware when the strokes weren’t done in the proper way, and kanji can be a killer cause some have many many strokes. Plus because there are many similar looking characters the direction a stroke starts from can change what the character is.

pic from Amazon