More Snowboarding and Fuku-Rediscovery
Snowboarding has pretty much ended. We may make one more trek in April, but most likely not. It’s kind of nice not to be driving out at the crack of dawn every weekend. We did make one last shot to Minami Aizu (about a 3 and a half hour drive over 2 sets of mountains, easily the coldest and snowest place in Fukushima-ken). It was a blast, wicked weather, decent snow. We rented cabins and 12 of us stayed in them. It was a pretty good time. The Miz (short for Minami Aizu) is absolutely beautiful, but it’s one of those nice to visit but wouldn’t wanna live there kinda places. Towns are about an hour apart from each other and there are only 6 ALTs (meaning only 6 foreigners in the entire area which is HUGE. It takes them an hour from any one apartment to anyone else’s apartment, sometimes more. Anyway, great time, and the car survived a trek through the mountains. Check out the pics. Miz Weekend
Anyway, with snowboarding kind of ending after the miz, to fill the void, Mo and I found a map of fukushima that has all these places (shrines etc) marked on it. So we’ve embarked on a fuku-rediscovery trek. It’s actually paid off so far. We’ve been to about 3 different places and they’ve all been pretty cool. The first one being a temple (read, buddhist) that is literally a 3 min walk from the house, the pictures say it all.
That was the weekend of the 21st. This past weekend we went to Sendai and then to Hanamiyama Koen (flower watching mountain park) with Matt Harris who lives in Minami Aizu. Harris has lived here all week, just to get the hell out of the miz. It was really nice and I can’t wait to go back in a little while for Hanami (flower watching/looking) which is basically when the cherry blossoms come out. It’s a huge thing for the Japanese. Here are the pics.
And the latest installment to all of this was our Shinobu Yama (mountain) adventure. It’s a “mountain” in the middle of town (it’s barely a mountain). It has shrines all over it and around it. As well, there’s a section where small kannon buddhas are carved in the wall. We also went and checked out another temple that has something to do with the shinobu kannon buddha. I took about 140 pictures, which is crazy, I know, but it was really cool. I condensed the whole thing down into 60 to fit it into a facebook album. Check it.
Shinobu - Iwaya-kannon, gokoku shrine and shinobu-mochizuri kannon (in that order)
As well as all these lovely pictures, i’ve completed 2 videos….one is complete dancing randomness that contains the contest at Inawashiro from my birthday that won me a night at the Hyatt Regency in Shinjuku (tokyo) cuz performances were required. If you want to maintain respect for me (if you actually have any, you may want to give it a miss).
Dancing
I also compiled a video of all the snowboarding clips i had. The part with just me is pretty much the same, but this includes the boxer run as well as a few other things. Mo’s in it but only a little bit cuz she wouldn’t do jumps with everyone else.
Here it is.
well, that’s it for now I guess. My reign over FuJET with Shaun Moody is going to come to an end in about a week or so. Looking forward to it. And China in a month!! That should make for some good pictures.
Hope everything is good with everyone,
B
