Sunday 20 November 2011

Wajima Crab Festival

Oh my! two posts in one day? This is a combination of avoiding work and instead of beening lazy do something with it....but still beening lazy in a sense :P

Yesterday out of the blue Taku, one of resident advisor of my dorm and a guy who did an exchange year at Liverpool John Moores asked me whether i wanted to go to this crab festival that was going to be held in Noto Penisula in Wajima city.  I of course said yes!!! Crabs yum yum!!!

We set off at about 9am and it took us about three hours to get there, the weather today has been bad and it has been raining for most of the day.  Also i'm glad that i thought about us going to the coast would mean COLD! I'm glad i wrapped up warm and I wasn't one of the people who kept complaining about the cold :P

Basically it was an eating festival which it my kind of thing! We weren't sure what to eat but headed for the Osyter, most of the food sold were expensive but you kinda expect it at these kind of festivals and you would have thought it would be fresh.

 It was really windy and raining but everything was under this big tent thing

These were quite expensive, about £5 for four, i shared two with Taku so £2.50 but they were really good and tasted really fresh!

 I would say the main attraction! Luckily I managed to get the last bowl of crab soup! With a little of gajin smash used but Taku only got soup :P but all of us managed to give him some crab

Fishing crabs, alot of kids were really interested in this, i heard it was £5 for a minute go! So expensive!
 MEAT STICK!!! It was really really tasty!!!! The beef was really tasty!
You could buy your own seafood and cooked it BBQ style, i regret i didn't heat up my scallops :( these were Irina's. So spent a little bit on the seafood but it was nice!!!! The scallops were probably the best deal as they were big and only £3.50

After finishing eating we tried to walk around, Wajima is famous for lacquer wear but it was really really expensive..... it got too cold for people so we decided to head back. The weather is rain, rain and more rain...i may have to invest in some wellies, it is insane, worst than Manchester i think! I presume when the temperature drops, that rain would then turn into snow....

The journey to the two N cities

Ok i have to admit i have been a little lazy.... At the beginning of November, there was a national holiday on the 3rd November called Culture Day, the university gave us thur, fri and monday off which meant 5 days off including the weekend! At first there were plans of going to Osaka but those plans fell thru and as i wanted to go somewhere i decided to travel to Nagoya on my own to do some shopping! It was from Saturday til Monday and i managed to find a cheap hotel for £50 for two nights which included breakfast and £60 return on coach.

So i thought i've got myself two days to just relax and chill but on Thursday morning i was contacted by Lai-san who is from America and asked me if i wanted to go to Nara, her original plan was go on friday and come back on saturday night, which was no good for me as i booked my coach to Nagoya for saturday morning.  Then we discussed and decided lets go on that day and come back on friday! So after an hour and half or so of finding a place to stay, packing and showering we went to the station to buy our train ticket!!!

The train ticket was really expensive!! ;___; but oh well we live only once! It was about £130 return, we set off about 1pm and had to transfer from Kyoto to get a train to Nara, we got to Nara about 5pm and our hostel wasn't that hard to find and was actually really close to the attractions nearby.

The ramen place we went to eat after settling in our guest house, this was a big bowl of ramen!!
 

 My room or space i got, it was ok for the one night!

 
Outside the quaint guest house where we stayed for one night
About 5 minutes from the guest house we would walk out to this lake which is the start of the attractions. We started around 9am and just walked to all the places.  We finished about 2pm in the afternoon.
Our first sighting of a deer!
I think this sign is really funny
It is like a myth thing that if you bow to a deer they will bow back, you should have seen how many times we kept doing it to them! I managed to capture one bowing to Lai-san!
You can buy these biscuits for the deer to eat called senbei which they love to eat!

This the biggest wooden structure in the world! Which inside houses a big Buddha

Then there is one pillar in this place which has a hole in it, i checked it up afterwards and the hole is the size of the Buddha's nostril! They say if you able to go thru the hole then you will reach enlightment or something. At first i didnt want to try as the hole did look really small... but after Lai-san tried it i thought ok i'll try it! It took me a little while to get thru.....but i did it!
 Me struggling
 TA DAH!!!


 After that we went to this cafe that was recommended by a magazine, it was expensive as it was about £12 for a lunch set! But oh well you have to try it! I went for a pita bread thing which came with soup and small salad thing.  I found the deer logo on my pitta bread sooo cute! Then came the dessert and tea! The dessert was like a syrup fig and i had tea!! But it was still not like british tea, i do miss a good cuppa!
 The cafe used to be a small workshop and the owner turned it into a cafe so it had a chic feel inside with the new and old parts.

We wanted to go the Nara National museum but there was a really big queue so we had to give that a miss, so we went shopping and brought more food to eat especially for our ride back to Kanazawa and this pudding called Daibutsu pudding was the best pudding i have ever had!!! It was sooooooo creamy! And the lid was sooo cute, i've kept it as my coin pot.

Nagoya!
We missed the train we wanted to get which was weird as normally trains are not late in Japan and the train from Nara to Kyoto was delayed which meant missing our connection. We waited for the next one but because we missed the earlier train when we got back to Kanazawa station we realised that we had missed the last bus to our campus and we had to get a bus to the bottom of the hill and walk back up, at that point, we were sooooo tired!!! 

Got back about 10pm, a bit of panick as i found out that the first bus that goes from our campus to the train station was 8:40am and my coach to Nagoya was at 9:30 which i had not paid for the tickets yet.  After some searching and someone confirming the bus stop for me i found an earlier bus but i had to walk down the hill. So I got up really early about 5am   (x___X) Also to note that i had cold which had finally surfaced from the previous weekend of no sleep too! Got out of the dorm before 7am and walked down for 20mins to the bus stop.  I got to the train station really early and could have got the 8:30am bus :P had about a hour to kill!

Finally it was time for boarding and i didn't realised we had seat numbers, as i got on i knew that there were seat reservation as people were looking up to see the numbers. I thought i hope i just sat on the right seat, but after the third stop, i found i was in the wrong seat when a couple wanted to sit where i was, so with my broken Japanese i asked where i was suppose to sit, it was the seat behind :P

After a nearly 3 hour trip i got to Nagoya!!! The first stop: PEPPER LUNCH! I loved it when i lived in Nagoya and it was nice! Felt a little weird i was the only girl eating there but oh well!

 My hotel, it looks sooo small sandwiched between the other buildings!
 The busy streets of Nagoya!
 My room! I wished i had that bathroom back at my dorm :( i miss that shower.....

I took a nap as because of my cold make me really really tired, i missed a call from Joseph who was in my training group when i worked at AEON, he is now married and is expecting his first kid in January! wow! But managed to contact him and finally made my way back to Nagoya station to meet him and his co workers for dinner.  Definitely brought back memories going down underground to eat as we had to do that for the first week and an half for training.... we ate at an Italian, the most important was of course the dessert!
yum yum!
Me and Joseph


The next day after quite a full japanese style breakfast of rice and fish i decided i'll walk to Osu Kannon, a shopping area which was not that far from the hotel
 I took this picture as why would someone want their photo taken here? I would understand if there was a passport place or something which required photos but in front of a car park?
 After about 20 minutes i arrived!
 The main bit is this temple and then shopping acade which connects to this temple

 one of the many streets
 This is a new cafe that i hadn't seen! It was a maid cafe, i took it from far away as it said on the board outside no photos.
 double yum yum! custard inside
 I waited probably more than 15minutes for this but it was nice!!! Pork wrapped around rice, this one had curry rice inside.


 After some mad shopping and many shopping bags later i met up with another friend of mine who has been living in Japan for quite a few years called Simon.  We ate at mcdonalds which i didn't mind as it was my first time eating at one since i've got here and i did want to save money as i spent sooo much! After that got myself a cake set! This trip to Nagoya was definitely more about the food then anything else! The dessert was like a pumpkin flan or something, quite nice actually and my cup of tea tasted like what a cup of tea should taste like! I returned early to have a skype chat with my bro using the hotel internet and just rested as i was still a little under the weather.

The next day I returned back to Kanazawa about 6pm and before i went back i had to buy myself a krispy kreme donut! This was something that wasn't here when i was living in Nagoya! I was told that when it first opened there was a 5 hour wait for them! Luckily that day there was no queue :P

How cute is that!!!

I haven't been doing much last weekend, i went to Kareoke and just rested on saturday, the day after was this event to celebrate the international relations Kanazawa University has with 5 Asian universities, this included free food! There was a bit of a cake fight going on at one point which involved a French guy demanding some cake off these Chinese people who their way of getting food was assign each person a task to get certain food on their plate so they got the best things like there was no fruit left and thankfully someone got me a piece of cake to eat before it was all gone.  But enjoyed with myself with the entertainment and of course free food and drink!

This brings it to this weekend where today (sunday 20th) i went to Wajima to a crab festival! Much seafood was eaten!



Sunday 30 October 2011

University trip!!!

This weekend has worn me out!!!! I've got a little of a sore throat this morning which is not good and now i'm trying to eat as much healthly food that i can so i won't get sick!!!

Friday was the halloween party at the dorm, it was funny how many Japanese guys dressed up as women and how much prettier they were with the makeup on!

I managed to get to bed about 1am as we had to meet up for this university trip at 8:30am! The first thing we did was a city walk around Kanazawa, within 5 minutes of this trip even though i wasn't that hungover or drunk I managed to fall forward onto the ground onto my knee and wrist! OUCH!!! This was added to the muscle pain i was getting of doing Joudo the day before which is a form of Japanese martial arts using a stick. Paracetamol was my best friend that day!!!
The tour took us around most of the central Kanazawa city area.



 This is part of Kanazawa castle grounds, the concrete part there used to be where Kanazawa univeristy was!!! I think they demolished it about 10 years ago.




 This fountain is what they based Kanazawa name from, the city got its name for the gold pieces in the water that they found



 We then proceeded to a musuem of D.T Suzuki, i had no idea who he was :P but he was a Buddhist philosopher and i love this quote he used from a Shakespeare play As You Like It

 This is meant to say 'No entry' beats using a ugly plastic sign to tell us, i hope i remember this rule!
 The last stop of the tour was the 21st Century Contemporary musuem, it was like the Tate Modern, the art was toooo modern for me!!! There was some good pieces like this one above where it was like the people was in the swimming pool

 The party room which i liked the best! It was the only art piece inside that allowed you to take pictures, it was very relaxing sitting on the beanbags and listen to the music played on the decks, very chillax!


After this we went to the mountain lodge where we were going to stay for the night, after lunch we started to make Japanese paper!

 This was pulp which came from the trees which is nearby the place we stayed, the people on my table did not like touching it and refered it to looking like a brain or something!
 We had to hammer the thing

 Then make this mixture of the pulp and this sustance which was like glue/snot hahahaha

 The teacher showing us how to make the paper using the mixture, which first consisted of making a first layer, then add the pictures that we designed from then sandwich them with the rest of the mixture
 This involves shaking the frame with the mixture so that the water would drain into the box but leave the pulp plus the glue thing behind to make the paper.

 Me taking the wet pulp
 After patting it against the towel....
I got my paper which i then had to iron to dry it!
 We then made a nightlight thing with the paper!

In the evening we had a party which consisted of two games which were fun and then more drinking!!! The party stopped before midnight which was a bit of a buzz kill and it involved one silly case of ninja hunting for the alchohol which we failed at :(  I decided to go to bed at 1:30am as we had to be up at 6:30 the next morning!!!!!

After breakfast and tidying our rooms we went to this place where we made soba noodles for our lunch

 My soba making team!!! From the left: Kaisu from Finland and Katherine and Mary from good ol'england!!! They are from Sheffield university

 Our teacher who basically did most of the work for us...
 We would try to do what he said and then when he came to inspect he would then finish off that task and then tell us what to do again and then repeat the whole process, this is probably why the three groups he was supervising were the first to finish and eat the noodles :P
 Cutting the noodles!!!


 Our completed noodles!!!

 The only thing was that it was cold soba noodles which were a little cold for us to eat as it was a bit chilly that day but i think good job on us making it!!!
Across the way from the soba noodle place there is this cultural site where houses from Edo era have been reconstructed or moved from their original location and put together here.






And that was it, we came back to the dorm about 1:30pm and everyone was tired, had to have a nap and after a night's sleep, still tired and now a sore throat....great.
From this Thursday to Monday next week we have no uni as it is the univerisity culture festival! Maybe we are thinking of going to Osaka but not too sure but at least hoping to at least go somewhere in the 5 days we have off!