touch your toes tootsie roll ( mino monkey adventure)

So, last thursday we ( shiv me, kimu and dom-san) set out to the town/city of mino in search of the forest monkeys. We picked a great day to go to mino because it was really warm ( t shirt ) weather and sunny. the town was very cute and picturesque. The walk to mino falls was especially nice, and the fresh air was really welcomed. Osaka air will kill you (eventually...). kim shares the same dislike for squat toilets as I do, so i felt that we bonded more on this trip cause there were no western toilets. The falls was ok. i give it a 3/10 for wow value. Niagra falls getting a 9, and that falls in nordegg gets an 9.8 (cause it was so amazing and had 3 parts and could get so close. So, it wasn't too impressive, it could have been mistaken for a bust pipe line that happened to cascade down a rocky cliff.

The rest of the day was good though, we went walking to find the interpretive center mino, and like all adventures in Japan, getting there is most of the fun. the walk was great and we saw monkeys just sitting alongside the highway. It was grand. There were monkeys in the tree's and i sort of felt like we were in jungle book. me and shiv were hoping that they (monkeys) would burst out into song ( I wanna walk like you..talk like you...) but they didn't.

We did however see some really had core japanese photographers. They had lenses on their camera that were nearly 1 m long, and their camera accesories had camo print on them so that they couldn't be seen by the monkeys ( yeah right). Shiv estimated that one mans camera equipment was worth over $10,000.

So after stopping a bit, taking pictures, and visiting an insect/taxidermy exhibit at the visitor booth, we headed back to civilization and we were well pooped. Here are some pics from our day at mino.

setsubun and sushi

so setsubun fell on feb 3rd (ish) i think... well its a japanese festival that is celebrated to symbolize a coming of the new year. Sort of follows the gust of out with the old, in with the new.
We have a single mum and her 2 kids living next door to us, and for setsubun she took on the role of "the devil". For setsubun families usually have the dad play the role of the devil figure. The devil is supposed to signify the evil and bad traces that can be found lurking in your home and daily life. So the children of a household will do a little role play of ousting the devil from their home via pelting it with beans.
So, next door, the mum dressed up as the devil and her two crazy toddlers pelted her with beans. I thought it was so cute. She really does alot to make her kids experience the fun in japanese and western holidays. For christmas time she even dressed up as santa claus.
even though her kids run back and forth on the hard wood, play tag at night and cry and throw temper tantrums, both me and shiv have a soft heart for her cause she works, plays and raises two really sweet kids. Often when me and shiv are settling down in to bed on our single man futon mattress, our heads a few inches from the wall-- we will hear a vibrant game of tag/running/screaming/singing.
The pictures that i have included in todays post are from a shinto setsubun festival at a temple in the nipponbashi/tennoji area.
Our day of setsubun began after work, we tepped out into the OCAT silver ball area and to our suprise there was a hip hop battle/concert going on. It was nuts, there were so many people there and they were all watching people dance, dancing to music, or dancing to music in their heads. it was just grand, and then there were battles for break dancing.

I think an interesting thing about japanese b-boy/girls is that they are stull super polite, they bow after one team/side does a break dance/battle . and they shake hands after. its a thing to see all these super decked out hip hoppers bowing to each other. its so japanese.

next we ( ps we is kim-mu, dom-san, shiv, and jan) took the train to umeda area (the commercial/finacial business district of osaka) to find a setsubun event. we tried following a map, asking directions and finding it ourselves but in the end we found nothing, and had a great time doing it. As with many adventures we've had, getting to the destination is 87-99% of the fun, for example -- take a hike to one of japan's thousands of slightly different temples and you'll know what im talking about.
So after exploring umeda for that setsubun thingy, we gave up and tried our luck at finding the "Burning Man" display going down at a shinto temple closer to namba area.
and boy! was that worth it. there were only a few people at the event, and it looked felt and sounded more like a cultic ritual than a holiday gathering.
There was some really creepy sounding chanting and a huge fire, that got bigger and bigger because the "priests" were throwing wooden tablets into the fire. The preists were wearing there huge white baggy shawls, and there shiny plastic hats that were really interesting. I think the whole festival had something to do with " in with the good, out with the bad". More so, a nice little lady ushered us over to the beverage counter where there was a hot, sweet ginger drink..dad you would have loved it. I loved it and you know i dont like ginger!
great photo ops, i think shiv got some great shots www.pbase.com/shivdesilva and so did dom and kim.

We were really hungry after all our walking and searching for a setsubun display, so we decided to save our hunger all day, and then go nuts, NUTS at Ryu-Gaku , and all you can eat sushi train restaurant. and go nuts we did. As you can see in the photos, we ate on average 20 plates each!!, shivs pile is the smallest, BUT, the waitress took away most of his plates before he could stop her. So shivs pile would be higher.
So in 1st place is dom, then me, then kim then shiv. (plates-wise). i dont even like raw fish, and I loved this sushi place. i like the egg, omlette ones, the shrimo ones, the surf clam and the beefy ones, there are also tuna ones and crab ones. So even if you dont like fish, you can do well at Ryu-Gaku. ps, there are also desserts on the sushi train.

These are the photos to prove the carnage

Buns o steel part 3: Dimonji Mountain

good day readers!
i forgot to put this post in, so i am writting it in march, but it actually happened in february. we went to kyoto, to see a slightly different temple "ginkakuji temple". So by now i thnk i should have learned my lesson. the temple was built to be a summer retreat home for an emperor. and he actually wanted it covered in a silver leaf paint, i guess to be sort of frivolous. But i think he was ambushed before his dreams of a silver house came into fruition. I was really disapointed by his home. I was more impressed with the walk way up to the temple, than with the actual temple. And what made me more pissed off was spendind 1000 yen to enter the grounds. If the temple "experience" was free, I would have been much happier, but 1000 yen. what the hell!!!
The temple was about the size of a small house, but the rrounds were quite large and tree-y. The high light of the ginkakji experience was meeting a professor from toronto in the bath room. She was really nice, and was on a short trip form korea. she was teaching engligh methodology to korean english teachers.

After the ginkakuji bit, be and shiv set out on the real adventure for the day, climbing dimonji mountain and then hiking down the mountain weaving our way through some other mountain temples. well that was the plan..

we did make it up dimonji mountain, and boy was it great. I like hiking with shiv, cause he makes the trip really fun, you forget that your sweating like a pig and your legs are numb. dimonji mountain is a huge mountain that towers over Kyoto. In the summer during the dimonji matusri (festival). tons of wood is "pully-ed" up the mounatin and set up in many individually spaced fire pits that form the over all shape of the "dai" symbol.

So in all, there is a huge "dai" symbol made of little fires burned into the side of a mountain. Quite a spectacle if i can say so myself. some of the pictures are from our accent up to the peak. There was a really cute temple right on the peak of the mounatin, as well as a great veiw.

we also met a really nice friend at the top of the mounatin. a 75 year old man, that was so friendly and offered to take us down the mountain. We told him we were going to nanzen ji temple, and he said he was going there too. We were hoping to see other temples on the way down, bUt i think he misunderstood and took us on a sweet short cut down the mountain.

He was so nice, and relentless at english, he did NOT use a lick of englsih for the 2 hours it took to get down the mountain. It was great. Shivs japanese is getting great.mne not so much. But the little man was bounding down the mountain like a gazelle, i actually think he was sprint-hopping the whole way. This man was the epitomy of fitness.

It started to rain, and he took us through a more treed area so that we didn't get wet. The whole time i thought he was taking us into his secret lair to kill us, My moms wild imagination has genetically been implanted in me and I cant help but always imagine the worst. So the whole way i was looking for any sign of accomplises, booby traps, clothing scraps etc.. my mind was racing a million miles a minute, but all in all, our lives aren't so intersting.

He got us down the mountain, safe and dry and in the court yards of nanzen ji temple. such a nice man, he even gave us historical commentary about the areas, temples, japan and other stuff all in japanese (with lots of hand motions).
great day, enjoy the photos.

Buns O steel Part 1-B Mt. Ikoma

Hiking trip # 2 was great. It was attended my me, shiv, Dom, Kim, Alex(USA) and Sheila(Vancity). we started our real early. 7:30 check out time from our apartment. We then headed to 211, dom and kims apartment and from there we headed to shin_imamiya station to meet alex and sheila.

From the station we took the train to Mt Ikoma. The plan was to hike the mpuntain, see some shrines, an abandoned amusment park and have fun. All initatives were met and my calves still hurt 4 days later.

We took some wrong turns getting up the mountain but we saw some cool shrines, a pool of ceramic turtles, some chanting by shinto monks, old stone shito relics in the forest and much more cool stuff. We started off our hike by walking along a pilgramage path. so every hundred meters or so there were shrines and relics and all sorts of neat rockery.

Me and shiv came well prepared with our MEC bags, full of food and extra clothes. They were a tad heavy, but atleast we were warm, well fed and dry (dad!). we passed through lots of residential areas, it was really nice to see actual houses and not so many apartments. As we made our way up the mountain we passed by probably the best smelling place ever. it smelt like cinnamon, cloves and wintergreen.

we got to the top and waiting for us was a old old amusment park and vending machines. YAH! we passed by this gate that was full of pad locks. the pad locks have an interesting story though, lovers lock pad locks on to the gate as a symbol of their bounded love. some of the locks were really old. I think 1950's at least. very neat.
we then started to make our way down the mountain and at the end of the path was my pot of gold. a ramen shop!!
I love ramen. i love ramen. its a big bowl of beefy broth, noodles, mushrooms, sprouts, and a slab or ham. i love ramen.

we started our hike at 9ish and ended at 2 ish. all i can say is i worked muscles i never knew i had. to make the evening perfect we finished off the night by heading to alex and sheila apartment for Burritos. so good, i had to put a picture up on the blog to commemorate them.

I cut my nails for this!

so last wenesday night we went out for one thing only! to kick some ass.
we went bowling with the MM troops.
It was a great night. Team de Silva did really well, shiv got most of the points for our team though (216 for the night). Sophie wasn't doing so hot at the begining of the night, but by the end, she was on FIRE!! great fun had by all. Also there were this crazy group of japanese pre teen girls that loved to show us they could speak english by screaming random english words at us ,and getting into all of our photos.
photos of lee, the girls team, jon, the bowling shoes dispenser machine

Buns o Steel part 1-A. Rocco-san mountain

hello there.
so me and shiv have taken to a new fun hobby here in japan. yes you guessed it. climbing mountains. Well it was bound to happen. Japan basically is one big volcanic rock pointing out of the pacific..

So last week, me and shiv got up really ealry (on our day off), got our packs on, packed some salad, prunes, Ghana chocolate and kimchi and headed off to climb Rocco-san. The japanese often like to attach the word san (friend) to people, places and things that are fun and nice...hence Mt Rocco.

so we took the train to kobe, then another train (back towards Osaka) that took us to the foot of Rocco Mt. The main station sort of looked like a turn of the century german train station/disney land station. I liked it . we asked for directions, and the conductor lady said it would be an hour hike up to the top. Our plan was to hike up to the 1st platform, then from there take the gondola to the peak. But alas, they were fixing the gondola so we couldn't use it.

Our hike up was really fun... at first. then it got mad crazy steep. it was hilarious, we were at such an incline we had to stop every 5 or so steps to take a breather. The great thing about hiking a beast like rocco mt, is that older super fit japanese folks walk up rocco Mt like it was a sunday stroll.

Altogether it was a blast, i pretended that i was leading a big troop of expeditioners and shiv was one of the travelers and we did army-like sing songs through the bush. At one point the trail got really tiny and shiv had to take the lead and plow through the trees (such a man). Many times through out the expidition i though a wild boar would jum out and attack me, or that we would get lost and run out of food, or maybe a polar bear would attack us. I even thought i saw balck smoke at one point. Man.. i can't wait till LOst comes back on.

But we made it to the check point and all was great, there was a nice hot vending machine coffee waiting for us at the top.
Some interesting things we have notices about hiking japanese *mountains*
1) there are often vending machines full of most anything that can fit in a vending machine at the top of your climb
2) there are power lines and lots of electricity towers on the mountans, so you have to hike around them
3) The climb often starts out nicely, then gets steep, and steeper.

The climb was awesome. it was such a treat to breathe fresh non-downtown-osaka air. And as always the company was very enjoyable.
the pics are of our climb up rocco, the station, and the vending machine!