Sun and Sand

So after a relatively relaxed week (barring Friday of course: a welcome back party for someone I didn't know) I had an amazing weekend in Wakayama, an ocean front city less than 2 hours from Osaka. After the slightly confusing train ride caused by train routes and waking up way too early for a weekend, we ended up in Wakayama around lunchtime, with the host mother we were staying with not expecting us until about 5 or 6. So being mature and thoughtful, we decided to ride around and look for a themepark to occupy the time.

Wakayama is really a beautiful place, and we immediately decided we would come back soon if not just to look at the scenery. Right between the mountains and the ocean, Wakayama has some temples and castles too for plenty perfect photo opportunities, which we decided to try when we weren't on our park mission.

After navigating bus stops and stations with plenty of Japanese practice, we made it to Marine Land, or Port Europa (the park can't seem to decide on its own name).  The park is tiny but definitely a cheap touristy highlight of my trip so far. The front half of the park is modeled after Venice and Paris, while the back half hosts all kinds of gaudy American carnival rides, with plenty of live animal shows in between. We definitely stayed busy for hours enjoying being complete tourists along with everyone else for once. After cruising around until early evening, we finished with a ferris wheel ride and our hunger drove us to find the place we were staying at for the night.

Sakamoto-san, or Mama-san as we were instructed to call her is one of the nicest older Japanese people I've been fortunate enough to meet. With a daughter living in Norway and being a Lutheran (?! what are the odds??), Sakamoto-san hosts tons of homestays and makes sure all of her guests feel like her own children. We sat down to catch her up on things (one of my friends stayed with her two years ago), she instructed to sit down, relax, and help her with dinner.

I've never eaten such a huge dinner in my life. The course was sukiyaki a Japanese dish where ingredients are thrown in a huge communal heated pot and taken out individually, keeping everything hot and delicious. There were only five of us, host included, and we barely made a dent in the feast (of course you know I did my fair share). After rolling away from dinner, Sakamoto-san treated us to homemade parfaits and coffee for dessert while we decided on an after dinner activity.

We discovered our host mom is an origami expert, and it was instantly decided. The next five hours might have been one of the most interesting and frustrating weekend nights I've had in years. Origami is definitely not my speciality, but we cranked out tons and had a great time doing it, getting addicted to the point that physical exhaustion was our only reason to stop. Of course being college kids as soon as we hit our beds we couldn't sleep and stayed up way too late just sitting around talking and worrying about the massive spiders we kept finding in our rooms.

The next morning, we woke up bright and early (again...) to go with Sakamoto-san to church, and were treated again to massive amounts of delicious food, in the form of toast, melon bread, jelly, eggs, salad, ham, and anything else she could find to cook up for us. I would literally eat myself to death if I stayed more than one night! The church service was AMAZING, but being Lutheran I'm sure I got more out of it than usual. Everyone was extremely friendly and interesting, I knew all the hymns from home and could keep up the singing, and the sermon was great Japanese practice. We even had to give a self-introduction in front of the entire congregation!

Afterwards we started on our original plan for Wakayama: the beach. After an hour long walk with minimal getting ourselves lost and taking some detours for some awesome pictures, we made it to our first Japanese beach, which I was pleasantly surprised to see almost completely empty. The rest of the day was spent with lots of sun and water. The breeze blowing and the water were kind of cold (the two kids from up north did way better than me and the other girl) but we spent plenty of time swimming anyway, dodging jellyfish and even climbing up a surfbreaker and seeing some definitely Japanese water fauna, including fugu and seaslugs. On the way back one of our friends cut his feet up bad on barnacles, so we shortened our trip some to get him home. We promised to make this a much more frequent weekend stop though!

Now we have a new week of school, with lots of work to catch up on with a week's vacation, but at least there's ISA on Friday! I'm excited for my next trip to Wakayama though, as well as the other trips I'm planning, we'll see how that pans out, random decision is more my style!