Ridiculously tall stairway & unexpected experience

Again sorry for delay. Not only I'm very little at home I'm also having trouble uploading pictures fast. Somehow it takes like 15 minutes per picture. Not sure why is that. Not trouble with my internet speed which has very fast upload rate.

On Friday I decided to head for the Yamadera(literally mountain temple, for rather obvious reason). Trip started less than stellar as 45 minutes was NOT enough to get to train to Shinjuku from Shimo-Takaido(sheesh these crowds). Was banging my head to wall(literally) from frustration at one point. This caused me to miss the train I was supposed to take delaying arrival to Ooyama enough that I was juuuust in time for the train. Was walking on escalators up past other Japanese, my wrist clock said 9:23, had seen moment ago note that the train I was supposed to go in leaves at 9:22 and heard ”doors closing”. AARGH! Not even thinking jumped to first train I saw when I got up and just as I got in doors closed. Then time to figure WHAT train I had jumped. Of course the wrong one...Oops! Maybe should have just take time to verify train even at the cost of it leaving without me(if this HAD been right train verifying would have meant missing it for sure).

No idea where I was going except place name and no idea if I could get to destination from there so decided to simply hop out of train next station and hop to reverse train. This caused all together in the end hour and 10 minute delay to arrival. Good thing I'm scheduling my travels pretty loosely and this wasn't particularly long trip in a first place so I would still have plenty of time.

The Shinkansen I was supposed to hop into stopped into Sendai(yes THAT Sendai. The one struct hard by the Tsunami. And incidentally train also passed by Fukushima. Yes THAT Fukushima. The one with the Nuclear Reactor gone awry. Dunno how close I came to it but doubtful there would be multiple shinkansens each day going dangerously close anyway). Don't know how badly the stations surroundings was hit but if it was hit hard it's been pretty well repaired by now. Maybe the mass gravestones(I think that's what they were) are from the tsunami? In that case they were most visible remnant of the tsunami.

Arriving to the Yamadera first thing that hit me was that it was raining. Hard. And guess who had left umbrella home...So time to find new one which luckily was found around the corner.

Arriving to the temples foot gate(guided by helpful signs of where to go) it was time to enter temple. But you don't just enter from gate to this temple oh no! This one is bit trickier as it requires you to take 1000 step stairways all the way up. Well I don't know if that's REALLY 1000 step stairway or is that figure of speech but I can tell for sure it was a lot of steps. Step after step after step of climbing higher and higher. Pretty soon I was not only one showing signs of exhaustion. Luckily taking puctures gave good excuse to take a breathing pause.

 First dango I tasted here. Taste was again something I haven't before tasted. Not bad at all.

After what seemed like forever I started to think are these endless stairs when I arrived to level area where lots of Japanese were taking breather(all huffing and puffing. Seems even for fit ones this was arduous climb). I saw big building ahead and was thinking this must be the last sprint and people are just taking breather to enter the temple area relaxed and was so to speak patting myself to back for making it. Then I heard blood chilling word spoken aloud: ”hanbun”.

Hanbun? That was a joke right? RIGHT?!? I quickly asked person next to me was this place ”hanbun”. ”Yeah, roughly hanbun”. Oh christ. I was only HALF WAY up.

Well after bit of a breather resumed the climb and eventually(after a lots of steps) arrived finally to the temple. But looking back I had no regrets of climbing this stairway as despite the clouds the view was absolutely stunning(I seem to use that word a lot when describing views here. But having lived in pretty flat country in a flat area I don't get often chance to take a good look from this tall place). Unfortunately taking pictures from the interior of temple was as usual forbidden.

Then it was climb back to down. Took at least less time than the climb up though had to be careful to not slip. Could get dangerous or even deadly to fall on here.

For lunch I bought several...food items...from nearby store. Not quite sure what they were except two were some meat in sticks and other were hard plates. Reminded me bit of "näkkilepä" actually. The red one was HOT! I ate it and gulped down lots of tea down. Spicy spicy SPICY!

Saturday I was supposed to meet with Japanese for trip to Onsen but his friend(with whom we were supposed to meet) said he couldn't make it for the day after all and asked if it would be okay to post pone. Unfortunately day he asked I had booked with another person but luckily even though it was on a bit of a short notice it was not a problem to switch the meetings 1=1. Therefore I would be meeting with another friend of my Japanese teacher.

Unfortunately I was tad too overconfident on my kanji ability and hadn't copied email with directions to my Japanese text editor(with bigger font) and the smaller font in browser made me misread kanji which caused bit of a confusion regarding meeting place. In panic I rushed to find place I could use Internet which I found but which opened precisely when we were supposed to meet. Quickly rechecking email(should have copied it to my phone. Argh what a stupidity. Got too comfortable!) I found out precisely where I was supposed to meet and rushed back at the station(good thing I have been visiting to gym for over a year. This running would have been impossible before). Then I remembered that in all our email conversations I had not shown single picture of myself(and reverse though pictures of Japanese don't really help me to recognize them in a first go). ARGH! Luckily again being so notably non-Japanese paid off as she was able to recognize me. Saved!

Apologizing for being late(by about 10 minutes) we then headed for a bus. I had little idea what we were going to do! I had planned to see if I could think up some places I would like to see around the place but due to the quick change of plans(I asked if it would be okay to switch on Thursday evening, this was on Saturday and on Friday I was on the Yamadera which took longer than expected) had had no time to do that.

First stop was for quick lunch at soba restaurant where I ate soba with fried(tempura) shrimp. Very, very nice view from the restaurant. The chairs and table were bit of a small side though! Next we went for quick dessert. Not quite sure what the dessert was but it was good and I also got to try macha for the first time. Very interesting type of tea for sure.

Then we went for bit of a sight seeing dropping by on Great Buddha(like the one in Nara). That's one big statue for sure. We also got to go INSIDE the statue! Entrance was short(I could not stand straight) and narrow particularly in stairway which caused trouble particularly going down. Luckily person coming up just when I was approaching the bottom was kind enough to wait for me to get completely down.

Wonder why there's even such a place inside a statue?

After this came something I had not expected to do in Japan. She led me to place where you can try on old styled clothing like in samurai era. And against my expectations they did have size for me so after signing contract(which stated obvious stuff like I'll be viable for damage done, don't push sword into ground, take care of the clothes and also request to go to bathroom before starting. Sensible since getting out of those takes bit of a time!). After these were done I chose small sword, large sword and fan and then I was led to upstairs where I first removed clothes(barring pants) and was helped(doubtful you can even put them on yourself even if you tried) on the kimono. First the Japanese socks, then white shirt, belt type of thing to tighten it up, then upper part(those sleeves are indeed big), then parts below(interestingly put on more like pants). Belt over the waist(even with my waistline went over couple times to get it all. That's a one long belt!). Finally hat(I chose the smaller of the two) and I was ready to go down again. Have to say felt more than a bit peculiar!

Smaller sword went to belt while larger one had it's own rope that was tied around. Fan inside the belt as well and outside the Japanese shoes. Then it was time for some photo taking where I took various poses as instructed by the person guiding me(I by the way had given concent for the shop to use my picture in the poster wall they had outside showing pictures of previous customers). 

Then came another surprise. We were going for a walk! By god. I was going to walk in public in this outfit! And did we take any QUIET place to walk? Oh no! That's way too easy! So instead we headed for temple we had seen before which was right next to the station!

Station being so close we obviously saw a lot of people and unsurprisingly pretty much EVERYBODY was staring at me and not even bothering to hide it :D I however decided to take this with humour and so it didn't bother me(though without her with me would have been too embarassing!). Actually we were having good time at the reaction of people. In particular there was group of four schoolboys who kept taking quick glances at me which I found particularly funny. Some more photo's was taken by her along with video.

Only thing unpleasant about the walk was the scary idea of damaging the clothes I was wearing. I don't even want to think price I would end up paying in that case. Needless to say I was taking VERY good care of my steps, particularly when walking stairs.

Overall fun little experience. Certainly not something I'm likely going to be able to do in Finland!

After I had got out of the clothes we went to meet her husband and daughter in car and then to their home. The daughter is about the same age as my niece and was so adorable. Reminded me a lot of my niece. I have suspicion those two would get along rather well despite having no common language. Obviously the daughter found me bit of an odd sight and kept staring at me(well that's pretty common reaction from kids of that age here!) but with some encouragement from her mother did greet me, tell her name, age etc. At home I happaned to ask what's her favourite toy and turns out it was the card game Uno. We ended up playing it and she's totally crazy on that game. ”Once more! Once more!”. First game she won pretty fast and the smile she had was so awesome. Turns out playing Uno was good idea as it pretty much broke the ice between us and she was more comfortable around me after that. All in all evening went nicely eating(Takoyaki which was nice surprise since I love those. Don't think I had mentioned that before so lucky happenstance. Also got to try Natto. The smell is indeed HORRIBLE but taste wasn't actually that bad. As long as I can avoid smelling it I have no trouble eating it), playing Uno and talking a LOT. Don't think I have talked as much in Japanese as today.

Also got bunch more photo's with me and the daughter, me, daughter and mother and finally with help of a camera with timer all four of us. And for fun I took the arch-typical Japanese camera pose of v-shape fingers. First time I did that.

Definitely some of the best memories of the trip came from this day. Wearing the samurai clothes was fun, talking LOTS of Japanese was fun(couple times I had to resort to English but mostly it was in Japanese) and meeting with new people is always fun. Especially kids! That's a rare treat here.

Sunday goal was to go to place called Iga to see the Ninja festival that was going thorough April and some of May but unfortunately midroute fell asleep and went straight past station I was supposed to get off. With time table being bit tight(even though Iga wasn't that far off it had lots of traveling in non-shinkansen trains which eat time) and next day being particularly long day for which I still needed to prepare I opted to abandon the trip. I would either have very little time to be at the Iga or would be coming home past midnight, prepare plans for tomorrow's trip and then wake up well before 6 am. Neither option sounded particularly appealing.

Think I screwed up slightly with today. Might have been better to not even go anywhere as I was way too exhausted and tomorrow's going to be another hard day.