Golden Week is Japan's equivalent of Spring Brink, but with marginally less booze. Certainly no breasts are being shown, anyhow. Rather, the week is golden because it contains three national holidays. This year, two of those holidays fell on Saturday and Sunday, which cut Golden Week unceremoniously short and demoted it, as my friend Ewan said, to "Bronze Week." Still, we tried to make the best of it.
Kaori, one of our Japanese friends we knew in Seattle, decided to come up to Sendai and spend the weekend with us. We had a long standing invitation to stay at our friend Aaron's place, so the three of us, like Basho himself, made our way into Miyagi's deep northern interior. Aaron's place is in a small town, and unlike most apartment-bound JETs, he lives by himself in a self-standing, cottage-like house. Like any good Portlander worth his salt, Aaron is a great outdoorsman, and so he took us around to some of his favorite natural haunts, including a swimming hole where we found fossilized leaves (see below), and a short hike up to a fairly magnificent waterfall. After the hiking we had lunch at a great family-owned roadside restaurant/produce market, where we saw a grandmother kill a giant Asian hornet, the size of her fist, with a tiny fly swatter. Our hunger satiated, Aaron took us to Naruko, a small town famous for its onsen resorts. The best onsen are natural outdoor hotsprings, and the one we went to was beautiful. It overlooked a river and the blossoms from an adjacent cherry tree drifted down upon us while we were bathing. That night, after a big meal, I played guitar with Aaron and Kaori joined in on a bunch of Belle and Sebastian songs.
Then, on Tuesday, we met up with Joy and Sergio and went to the Yagiyama zoo, which is near my visit school. It's a small zoo, and most of the animals looked depressed, except for the monkeys, who were very clearly bi-polar. Still, we had a good time and Juli was seconds away from hopping the fence into the tiger cage when he started purring his throaty tiger purr.
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