Friday started off to a fantastic start w/ breakfast at the hotel, complete with GRAPEFRUIT JUICE. Anybody who has shamelessly bribed me during the YPMB Scav Hunt knows that I kind of love grapefruit juice. All my flex dollars at school generally go to buying Grapefruit Juice from Durfees. I have to admit I'm not as brave as the others to try the unidentifiable foods offered in the breakfast buffet for fear of upsetting my stomach the rest of the day. Instead, I settled for corn, watermelon, eggs, croissants, and of course, GRAPEFRUIT JUICE. Om nom nom. While on the topic of food, I'm kind of a sucker for "cute" things, which applies to anything from stores, foods, animals, and perhaps even people. In any case, I'm definitely a fan of all the various cutesy Japanese products with their colorful packaging and adorable illustrations. As such, I couldn't resist buying (or taking photos of) the various items:
Yummy mini packaged cupcake-like snacks which looked too cute not to buy. Yeah, I'm going to go broke if I keep buying everything that looks cute in Japan. でも、おいしかったよ！
Melon Cream Soda & Kirin Milk Tea (bought at Yiwen's recommendation). The Milk Tea is really good, and tastes like the coconut milk tea I had in New York when I went w/ Kevin freshmen year.
I have to admit, the sweet One Piece illustration on the Melon Cream Soda may have had something to do with my purchasing it. Hopefully, it'll be delicious too though =)
Lastly, a Fanta ふるふるシェイカー, some sort of jello-like drink which liquifies after you shake it. I actually read about it on Chris' Blog and had to try one. I'll keep you updated on how it tastes after I try it.
Anyway, breakfast was followed by the 10 minute or so walk up the hill to HIF, which was marked by my hearing Lady GaGa's Poker Face playing from one of the shops we passed. WIN. That actually kind of made my day. Upon arriving at HIF, we were given a tour of the building (most of which I couldn't understand, sad pandas) and separated into rooms for the mysterious SPOT Test about which nobody seemed to know anything. Joseph, Chris, and I mused that it was probably all some sort of suspense-inducing ploy by the instructors to test our mettle. The actual test was much much worse. A Japanese audio file was played with sentence after sentence of the fastest Japanese I have ever heard, and we were given sheets with the instructions to fill in the blanks from the tape. The best strategy turned out to be reading the few kana before the blank and listening for them specifically while ignoring everything else, although even then it was rather difficult, and I found that once I missed one blank, I also messed up the next several in my attempts to repeat and think back upon what I had just heard. Fail.
After another short orientation in which the HIF instructors were introduced and instructions for our independent study project were divulged (in Japanese, so I had to get a translation from Thanu later), I joined a group of 10 other HIFers and after wandering about in a rather failed attempt to find a cheap bento shop, we grabbed a quick lunch. I ordered a beer! Legally! And...it was really gross, haha--失敗 (Shippai!). Afterwards, we all decided to brave nature and made the trek to and up Hakodate-Yama. East Rock doesn't even come close to how beautiful the trails up Mt. Hakodate were, not to mention the absolutely amazing view of the island. Pictures:
I love nature. Seriously, I think 函館山 may be my favorite place in the whole world.
I could have sat there for hours and just stared at the sea, it was soooooo pretty.
Like a typical group of 外人, we had to consult the maps frequently, although our fearless leader, Victor (Harvard Grad Student) took excellent care of our little group. Also pictured, my awesome roommate, Yiwen (goes by Yvon).
A lot of these shrines were scattered all over the mountainside. Ashok and I agreed later that if it we weren't worried that it wouldn't be PC, it'd be way cool to do charcoal rubbings of the writing carved into the base of the statues.
Anyway, more pictures can be found on my album on facebook here. N.B., if you ever get a chance to climb the mountain, be sure to bring a jacket because it gets fairly windy and cold at the top. The entire trek took our group about 3 hours, although we spent a fair amount of time taking pictures and enjoying the view. After this epic nature hike, we stopped briefly at the hotel where the Itagaki twins and Helen Gao (other Yalies!) joined our party for dinner at Wara Wara Something Restaurant--I was very amused and somewhat perturbed to hear the Offspring's Pretty Fly for a White Guy playing in the background while we dined. The servings there were somewhat small, but extremely cheap, and we ordered about 25 servings to share amongst the 14 of us, plus dessert and cocktails for some--I actually ordered a Karua Miruku (Kahlua Milk!). They don't seem to put much alcohol in the drinks (which is how I like them) and the Hakodate milk held true to its notoriety for being extremely sweet and delicious, so the entire dining experience was a great success =). Juan Miguel (from Guatemala!) proved to be a human waste disposal and polished off whatever leftovers we had. ごちそうさまでした!
Afterwards, we mostly bummed around the hotel and I stopped by Ashok's room to visit and hear about his adventures for the day. Yiwen joined us too and we eventually ended up back in my room to enjoy another feast of green tea, pistachio nuts, orange slices (the gummy candy), and the mini-cupcakes previously described above. Yum! I actually got caught up chatting with a friend on facebook, so after taking care of a few other things, I finally ended up going to bed around 2 am, completely exhausted but really happy =).
DAY THREE!!!!!
Saturday proved to contain equally exhausting ventures. Ashok and I grabbed breakfast (and I met Cuong, who's actually Vietnamese and can talk with me in Viet, yay!) and went for a short run about a half hour later---if by run, you mean jog, and if by jog you mean fail. My sense of direction is slowly improving (taking pictures of everything and staring at all the signs all the time like a tourist while trying to decipher the kana really makes them stick in your memory) and I managed to lead us back to Mt. Hakodate for my second trip up the mountain. Ashok had not yet experienced the amazingness of the mountain having spent the previous day with Elliot and other HIFers at an onsen (public bath!).
I managed to jog to the base of the mountain at least, but the route was already uphill just to get there, and despite running with Bubba and working out all summer, I'm still pretty out of shape. I've never actually gotten over my dislike of hills from cross country (State was ALWAYS that stupid neverending slope/hill at Baylor) either. Anyway, we walked the rest of the way up the mountain and enjoyed the scenery while conversing in our equally poor Japanese for practice. There were actually a few pathways I hadn't seen yet, so we took those and ended up in what may have been a WWII base of sorts, which we both thought was really hardcore. I'll have to take my camera and take more pictures of those areas and head up the mountain a third time. Once we arrived at the top of the mountain, we sat outside for a good while and talked and enjoyed the gorgeous view again (I swear, I could sit there and never leave and be happy) before racing down the mountain as fast as we could to see if we could find the source of this foggy cloud that suddenly had appeared, although that remains a mystery. We did run into some HIF students as we were making our way back to the hotel, and I got a laugh when they saw that I was dressed in running clothes with only my passport in hand. Seriously, you have to take your passport everywhere.
We chatted a bit with the other students and then returned to the hotel, where Ashok and I very skillfully (note the sarcasm yet again) asked the person at the front desk for directions to the nearest スパー. Our pride at successfully conversing with her in Japanese quickly disappeared when we realized that the map we had handed her had a large black dot with bold black letters clearly reading "SUPERMARKET"---FAIL. The supermarket was fairly close by and we bought soumen noodles and an as of yet unidentified spice (neither of us could read the label), plus an ice cream bar which we ate before I could take a picture of it.
Soumen (99 yen) + Spice (108 yen) + Ice Cream (not pictured, 99 yen) = Really yummy, really cheap lunch = WIN
Our cooking enterprise did turn out successfully if I do say so myself though, even if we may have cooked the noodles a little too long. We used the water boiler in my room to cook the noodles, and after draining them, submerged them in cold water which we also drained before adding the mystery spice for great success! However, our lack of dining ware found us eating noodles our lunch out of a shared teacup (very classy) with a single pair of wooden chopsticks, like very civilized individuals (although Ashok pretty much stabbed the roof of my mouth with them while he was feeding me at one point). Anyway, Ashok and I agreed that our cooking success definitely merited photographic commemoration:
OM NOM NOM
I'll blog about today's adventures at Goryookaku Park sometime later--time for bed before classes commence tomorrow. Zyaa, mata!
ONE PIEEEECE.
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