Kuruizawa
We went to Kuruizawa on Friday. In Japan it is currently the obon vacation, a Buddhist festival in which the ancestors’ spirits are called back to earth for a 3-day visit. People bring vegetables, beer and wine to shrines and temples.
Kuruizawa is about 1 hour with the train. The train seemed to drive through Tokyo for ever. The 12 million people must live somewhere of course. There is no way one can really get a sense for how big a city is when one is in the middle of it as we have been for weeks now. Then, once the outskirts of the city were reached, the train drove for another 20 minutes (this was a shinkansen, so it was probably moving at great speed, although it is very hard to tell just how fast it was going) and all of a sudden we were in a nice forestry area. We took another train/tram to where we needed to go and then a taxi and arrived at our hotel, which looked like it could have been in Germany.
We could not check in yet, because the room would not be ready until 2pm, which gave us the chance to go out and have a picnic; we had purchased our lunch at the station, which came most beautifully wrapped in boxes. One of the lunches was even in an earthenware pot. We walked to be bird sanctuary which was a ways down the road. The road was one long train of cars. This is the time when everybody in Japan takes holidays, and Kuruizawa has been a popular vacation place for a long time, especially with Western missionaries, apparently.
We did not see a single bird in the entire bird sanctuary, but did see two spectacular butterflies. We also found there to be a nasty little black bug which when it bit took a whole piece of skin out and left small bleeding wounds. Very unpleasant. We left the bird sanctuary as soon as we had eaten enough lunch and walked back towards the station where we had seen a bicycle rental place. We got two ‘tandems’ (Dutch, a bicycle made for two) and a single bicycle which was a nice orange color. We rode the bicycles around the village and discovered again what a perfect means of transportation the bicycle really is; with comparatively little effort you can cover a lot of ground but you go slow enough to really enjoy the environment, smell the flowers and see how the ordinary people live, or in the case of Kuruizawa, the kind of vacation homes that the well-to-do from Tokyo build to retreat to. Many of them are quite nice, with a lot of beautiful wooden panelling on the outside, and rice paper screens in front of the windows. Unfortunately the American-style starter castles are also popular, complete with the fake stones on the outside, the two story high pillars to mark the front door. The area is relatively flat, so it is easy to ride, and it reminds me of the les landes area south of Bordeaux.
When we were hesitating at the entrance of an unpaved road, a Japanese man with children in the car opened his window and told us to go straight, at least we think that he was saying either that or he was pointing out that this was a private road and to stay out. We followed him into the road and came upon a very nice lovely spot next to the river, with a lot vegetation growing over the riverwhere we made boats from leaves and sticks. Then we noticed a playground barely visible through the trees on the other side of the river, and suddenly it became very important to go there immediately.
We took another nice road back to the hotel. The road to the hotel is at times too steep for a bicycle without gears, especially for a tandem where the person in the back is only making minor contributions to the forward progress.
When we walk in, the hotel room is one large tatami room with a low table in the middle and low chairs around it. They are remarkably comfortable, for a short time that is. All the woodwork is plain and straight and rather attractive. There are sets of slippers for everybody, there is a toilet which is ‘sterilized’ every time the maids have visited the room, according to a strip of paper across the seat and a shower and a bath. The only really out of character items in the room are a watercooker (which can be used to make green tea in the tea-set for or to make some kind of bouillon), a telephone and a television (to which we quickly add four wildly colored cellphones and a computer).
When you go for dinner (either at 18:00 or 19:00, you must tell the staff when) the maids come in, move the table, and clear anything else off the tatami mats and spread futons and beautiful down comforters. And if you stay with 5 people, that pretty much covers the entire floor except the places where the low table was moved to.
Breakfast and dinner were included in the hotel price (the hotel price is something I would rather not discuss), and they proved to be spectacular buffets. Everything is equally beautifully presented and it is a buffet, so you can pick!
Even for Saskia there were some things that could pass (mainly rice). But for the more adventurous eater there was much new food to try.
Here is a picture of my breakfast. (I went back for seconds!).
I have certainly not yet grown used to the Japanese palette. It is not only the taste of many items that is so very strange to me, the texture is too. A piece of meguro that melts in the mouth is easy enough to handle, but a full length seasnail not smothered in parsley, butter and garlic the way I like them, but largely left unharmed by whatever cooking process was used to kill it (is it even dead?). It is served in a beautiful shell, and is speared by a decorative toothpick, but then you pull it out of the shell and the bottom half is black because it is transparent and the black from it whatever is still in its gut is clearly visible, I could not make myself eat it. Roberta was braver, although separated its hindquarters from the and had to down half a beer immediately after.
Another texture surprise came in a beautifully presented red ball about the size of a cherry tomato, which looked a little sticky and very attractive and was presented with other vegetables so I thought it would be harmless. It turned out to be made of some kind of unidentified goo.
The hotel had an Onsen in the cellar (we later learned that there has been a scandal in Japan where many Onsen’s have been found to boil water instead of it being spring fed. Whether this was the case with our hotel we cannot tell you). We went into the family bath (Onsens are strictly separated and to the Japanese the very idea of mixed baths is a horror (I am with them on this one). When some of the Americans came over to stay in a Ryokan where there are only communal baths, and one of the American men did not want to go into the bath because he feared they were mixed, that story was told with great hilarity by our Japanese friends; that someone would even consider this is a possibility is laughable).
The Japanese like to put English texts on their t-shirts, but often their English turns out a little odd (we usually pick up on the ones with sexually insinuating text, although it is sometimes difficult to assess just what is being suggested because of grammatical and spelling errors). We will try to track some of the better ones and send them on to you for your enjoyment.
Seen on a young mother walking towards me in Shibuya-Ku with her two daughters. She was wearing a very tight black t-shirt with the following text displayed in pink letters about 4-5 inches high: “I want to bary me in your breasts”
Today near Shinjuku station on a young woman: “Dreamin of Juicy”
On a young man near Karajuku “Language: It happened in a flash”
On a heavy-chested woman’ tight white t-shirt at the breakfast buffet our nice Japanese hotel in Karuizawa: “This woman is nude” written in letters of different sizes and fonts.
5:41:30 PM 
|
