Okay, blogging for the sake of not forgetting my lovely weekend getaway at the beginning of last month. On Saturday there was an artist's fair in Bandai (Creator's Market) and Liza and I walked around checking everything out-- it was amazingly cool, and lots of the stuff was cheap. It ranged from lame fanart-for-sale to really nice photographs, graphics on buttons and shirts, and postcards and jewelry and loads of other stuff. I bought some pins, a keychain and some really pretty postcards and stickers-- and then had yakisoba for lunch, mmm.

Luckily I went back to my place and packed up on my lunch break, so I was just about ready to go when I finished work-- Kumiko-sensei checked for me and the shinkansen for Urasa left at 8:17, and I made it just in time (stopping to buy onigiri and tea on the way). It was so great to plop down and eat a cold dinner, and play on my little Gameboy. Puzzle Fighter makes time fly, I swear. I hopped off at Urasa, which was deserted of course, and Ai and her friends were waiting for me. We raided the 7-Eleven for fireworks, snacks, and alcohol before going back to the hotel, where we promptly opened several of the popsicles and some of the drinks and goofed around before finally getting ready to go down to the baths. Our room was huge! Tatami, four futons laid out side by side, big windows and lots of storage space (only the fridge was a bit too small, oops) and a really nice bathroom area. Which was good, because I had to shave before going downstairs!

So we finally all put on our yukata and trooped off to the baths-- it was late, so there were only two other people in our side, and they left after a few minutes. We had a good long wash and a good long soak in the inside bath, then moved to the outdoor one. It was raining outside, so the rain fell into the edge of the bath where the roof ended, and the air was nice and cool. I was amazed; it really is pleasant up in the mountains here. I was never hot and sticky; it was breezy and very damp, with clouds all over, all the time. It was actually much closer to the weather I'd expect at home, too, which went a long way towards relaxing me and making the weekend really feel like summer.

After a looooong soak and talk, we washed again and dried our hair, and left to find Ryouhei and Motoki waiting in the massage chairs with drinks. We went back to the room and watched late Saturday-night TV (ah, how I've missed that, all the music shows!) while snacking and drinking more. We talked about a whole lot of nothing and goofed off even more (Ai is very ticklish, eheheh) and made tentative plans for Sunday afternoon, and kept drinking. We gave up at about three AM, but it was nearly four when we finally settled down to sleep and the sky was getting light. We slept till about eight or nine, when they woke us to announce breakfast (we left Motoki to sleep, and were the last people to eat downstairs-- huge traditional breakfast, a bit too much for me). Afterwards we lounged around and I sat in a chair by the window in my yukata, and played the GBA and doodled in my sketchbook while enjoying the sunny view of the river and mountains on the other side. Clouds piled up on either side and there were loads of people fishing in the river, and several picnics going on. It was so peaceful, and hydrangeas blooming everywhere, and the river was fast and clear. Ai went back to sleep, then woke up and I got her to draw something in the book for me, and then Ryouhei joined us and we let Motoki sleep until the last minute, when we all finally put on real clothes and went downstairs for lunch at one-ish (it was zarusoba, pretty good stuff). Then we eventually got moving and piled in Motoki's car (which is eerily like Ai's old Honda, only with more crazy gadgets installed) and set off for Hakkai-san with his anime music playing on the mp3 player.

The drive was beautiful-- all fields and huge farmhouses and valleys lined with evergreens, flowers everywhere and the neighborhoods were enough to really make me wish I could stay for a week, or a month or forever. So quiet, and cool, damp and green. Green! How I miss the green, the forests! Living under trees! It was cloudy, too. When we got to Hakkai-san we climbed up to the lift platform, passing kids at summer camp along the way, rolling down the steep grassy hillside like it was covered in snow. We were the only people in the lift, which was a really big one, and it was like flying over the treetops, with the sound of rushing water below and the smell of fresh leaves. We rose right into a big cloud and it got really quiet and cool, and damp! It was lovely. At the top we could barely see anything except the ground and each other. We walked all the way up to the observation platform, a good stairclimb, but couldn't see anything. The trees were ghostly gorgeous, though, and on the way back we watched the mist flow around us and then Ai and I sat in the swings and enjoyed them for a few minutes before we had to board the lift again. Going down was really fast and kind of scary, because the cable was literally invisible in the mist-- it was like a descent into nothingness, before and behind. I've never been in a more surreal place. At the bottom we took lots of flower photos and ambled around the sports center inside-- the vending machine we bought Sumi Tea from was home to an awful lot of spiders-- and then packed off to drive around some more. We looped around the mountains and through a few more valleys, and the clouds got darker and thicker. We came around to the shinkansen tracks on the valley floor, and stopped just past them at a sake shop to buy some good Hakkaisan stuff, and some plum wine, and we boggled at the absinthe bottles and the crazy ancient alcohol from all over the world. Some of those bottles had to have been there for years! Then we pulled over on the side of the road by a rice field so Ryouhei could take some photos, and I got a few more in of the mountains and the sun behind the clouds. We doubled back to a huuuuge alcohol shop and spent ages poking around in the wine, the liquor, and the beer (and the snacks! Seaweed, fried nori, munchies, jelly, candy... how I love noriten!) and halfway through the mother of all thunderstorms hit us. It was LOUD and sharp and it poured. We finally got all our purchases and stood at the door as Motoki backed the car up exactly to the door for us (Ai hates thunder and lightning as much as I used to) and we still got really wet. The drive back was great, it was a spectacular storm and so nice to finally have a real summer thundershower.

We made it back in time for dinner, and we were starving! But dinner was /huge/-- salad, sashimi (very good sashimi), kanimiso (which was amazing), pickles, meat and vegetables and rice and miso soup and sake. We made more of an effort to use Japanese (ha!) and after a long time staggered back upstairs with the rest of our sake and pickles, to digest. We lay around and drank for a bit before deciding to look into karaoke, and ended up walking a goodly hike through smalltown covered streets and dark (darrrk!) neighborhoods in the rain to reach the bowling alley-- they had separate karaoke-trailers, it was really weird and yet felt a lot like a bowling alley at home. We got a nice big room and proceeded to be utter dorks. I sang L'Arc and got lots of help, and Motoki and I maxed out our old-anime-song stash-- it was so much fun! We know all the same songs-- he's just as big a Slayers fan as I am, bless him. We ended up staying for two hours, and then on the way back we stopped in the 24-hour used bookstore to poke around. It turned out to be a gold mine-- they had really old Slayers stuff, and I scored a DM guide for a hundred yen, and then I found the videos. Two GLAY videos, for a couple of bucks, and then two unopened concert DVDS-- half price each! I borrowed cash from Ai and then noticed a Hokugin sign down the street. So nice to travel in Niigata, I can actually use my bank card when I run out of cash.

We eventually hobbled back to the hotel, but it was a nice quiet walk, without the rain-- dark but there were four of us, and we had good conversation. I realized I've never really talked about fanstuff in Japanese before, and it was great fun and a great way to blow off steam. Refreshing, and nice to talk about something I still enjoy even though I don't get to spend much time on it anymore. We got back and hit the baths again, for a good long hour, and by then the stars were out-- Ai and I looked up from the rotemburo and we could see the Little Dipper. There were a lot of bugs out, though, grar. We washed and washed and used the yummy exfoliating soap and I decided not to dry my hair. We turned off all the lights and went back upstairs, and laid out all our alcohol again. I mowed through the whole bag of noriten (wish I'd bought two) and lots of plum wine, it was soooo good. Ai and Ryouhei went off to find more ice, so Motoki and I talked about comics, Comiket and Slayers for a while, then music and more random stuff. After ice was procured, we stayed up for a bit longer but finally gave out around three.

We slept through breakfast in the morning, straight until ten or eleven, and had lunch after we got dressed (it was mountain vegetables in rice, very very very good, with a huge bowl of miso soup and lots of pickles). Then we walked to the ATM so I could get more cash, and came back to pack up the room for checkout (we still had a lot of booze left over). Motoki did some research, armed himself with a route, and after buying some omiyage and settling the bill we set off in the car for Okutadami Dam. It was a long drive, but very pretty and Parkway-like. At a couple of points we went through insanely long tunnels (one was more than 18 kilometers long, and I'm sure the second was longer) that were full of water and fog thanks to the wet dripping down through the ground. It was like being in a horror movie, or one of those action movies where you're waiting for the monster to rear out of the fog and eat you. Creepy as hell. We ate chips and listened to more anime music (how I wish I had thought to get more titles from Motoki!) and tried to ignore our rumbling stomachs. When we finally got to the dam, we took a tiny cable car up to the upper level and walked along the top-- our ears popped twice-- to admire the view. We also saw a truly massive hawk, and did our best to get photos, but missed every time. It flew right over our heads twice, and we also saw it settle on a log near its mate in the lake, looking for fish, and Ai and I chased it along the road for a good thirty minutes before giving up. It was absolutely huge, I'd be willing to bet over a four-foot wingspan. Or whatever would pass for the largest possible size, at any rate. We watched the last boat come in from the lake, and the clouds drifting over the mountaintops (looked like Kanuga, in some spots) and then walked up to the dock to talk to the officials stationed there. They were very nice and showed us books of birds and about a movie (Whiteout) that had been filmed at the dam... must admit, I'd like to see it, I think. We sat on the stools on the deck for a while and enjoyed the cool breeze and silence; there were so many birds singing! It was utterly relaxing and quiet. When we got back to the car everyone else had left and the food shops were closed, so we drove off (back through the tunnels) and came out by a pretty river valley where we stopped at the bridge to take photos of the riverbed. There were almost no cars, and we drove past a very cool log-cabin lodge kind of place in the middle of it, and wished we'd known about it to stay there! It was just so perfect and so cool-looking. We kept driving, looking for another onsen to take a bath at, and stopped at this very out-of-the-way place at the end of a tunnel of cedar trees (it was like driving through a cathedral) full of dragonflies, where they only used lamps and had a pond full of pretty little fish and bowls full of tadpoles. The parking lot was full of cars from down south and far away; we then decided we wished we'd known to stay there all weekend. It was truly isolated, and there were such good smells coming from the kitchen, and Ai and I agreed that the wood interior reminded us of someone's grandmother's house in NC. We left reluctantly, but it was starting to get dark.

At long last we found a place that was mostly-empty, and we pulled in at the edge of a mountain backroad and paid for the baths. The washing was nice, but the water in the bath was so hot I couldn't get in past my knees and it turned them to jelly in a matter of seconds. When I got out, my legs were lobster-red. Yikes. It was nice to be clean and have dry hair, though, and we were the only people there so we left the door to the dressing room open in order to vent some of the oppressive steam (it really was too hot!). Then we sat in the lobby for a bit with the guys and looked through a Niigata magazine and talked about the shops and restaurants and I tried to convince them to come visit me for another weekend. XD We were so hungry, we made ourselves leave and drive back towards Urasa station since I was getting nervous about making the last train. We stopped at a family restaurant across the street from the station and had a huge, leisurely dinner (niramanjuu, shoyu ramen, hamburger steak, and pasta) and Motoki set up his laptop to check train times. I had until 10:37, so we decided to head to the river after dinner and use up the fireworks we still had in the trunk. We chose a spot that was up on the top of the bank, behind some dark apartments and near the bridge, and parked the car and started setting things off. It was great fun and we made a huge cloud of smoke and managed to actually use up all of what we'd bought, /just/ in time to zip me to the station and make sure I got the right ticket. I hugged Ai goodbye and ran up in time to wait a couple of minutes for the train, thank goodness, and then the ride back felt even faster than the ride on Saturday evening had.

That was, I think, the single best weekend I had all summer. I was so relaxed and it was so wonderful to see Ai, and talk to someone from home, about everything and nothing. That was the best part, I think-- someone from home! And the mountains. It was the perfect combination to combat my growing homesickness. I'm way overdue for some time at home, it's going to make things messy when do arrive, because then I'll want to come straight back here after a few weeks.

And now I have to stop this, and get something to eat. I want to go back to the bar we visited last night-- it was so cool and pseudo-Caribbean, and they have tacos on the menu and cheap import beer. Mmm, tacos. I need to make some soon.

the monkey ordered more gyouza @ 03:57 p.m.

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