Well can’t say it is nice to be back in HOT tokyo but i it was good to get home, wash clothes and be able to have showers and toast bread.
Camping though was great fun.
Thank you to Junni, Leader and Ryomei for driving all 20 of us around for the weekend. After leaving Kichijoji it took almost 4 hours to get to the destination after we stopped for rests, beer and toilet breaks and we all got out, dumped our stuff and opened a couple of drinks…..
Unfortunately then the frisby got stuck in a tree and poor Mathias had to climb up and get it (although i think he secretly loved climbing the tree.) But he arrived back down safely and the drinking and catching up continued.
Dinner on Japanese camping trips, always surprises me, because to me, making curry is not what you do when you go camping….you just buy some steak and sausages, bread and maybe some onions and maybe bring a ready made salad…BUT NOOOOOOO…..in Japan it is quite normal to make curry, cook rice and also make yakisoba (fried noodles with pork, cabbage, carrot and bbq sauce stuff). They even supply you with these little hard to clean things for the rice which actually reminded me of billy tea buckets…
The fun then moved down to campfire where we enjoyed some curry, yakisoba and booze and even some dancing around the fire…
There was some marshmellow roasting before we moved the party back up towards out campsite..
I have no idea what time we started winding up, but my guess is that we probably all moved inside our tent style huts around 1ish and carried on inside there…before going to sleep ( for some) and getting eaten alive by bugs (again for some)!
The next morning everyone was up and about by 11ish i’d say…there were some scary morning people though! Surprisingly there were no serious hangovers and we managed to get breakfast together, and all cleaned up fairly quickly…
It was just a shame that the crazy lady that came to do inspections, didn’t like the fact that she couldn’t see her reflections in the pans that looked to be about 10 years old….so there was a lot of re-washing going on…But overall it was a great weekend away!
After meeting down near the train station later on in the day, some of us decided to kick on and go to an onsen (hot spring bath) where, while i am not a huge fan of onsen, i have to say it was nice to shower and get into the onsen…even if everyone has to be naked…. Mai finished off her camping onsen weekend away by eating a giant dried squid…
Maybe i am getting used to life in Japan……i never used to be able to into onsen….it was just kind of too strange and embarrasing for me…but i have to say it was quite nice and i will definitely be doing it again…. But i am not so used to life here that i go around eating giant dried squid on a stick!!! I have some boundaries…
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I am just a twenty something Aussie girl living in Chiba, Japan with my Japanese husband trying to make sense of the crazy Japanese world we live in! We welcomed our first son in December 2009 (Noah) and a second son in January 2011, 2 months premature (Shion). I am working hard at raising them to be confident, bilingual, happy kids!
Whenever I’m reminded of what the Japanese eat, I think about an episode of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. I know, my age is showing. I’ve forgotten exactly what this particular episode was about, but there was one scene that stands out in my memory. A man in a really cheesy looking lobster suit was woddling around the engine room, supposedly fighting with the crew for control of the ship. After knocking the chief down with a clumsy looking blow from his right claw, he said something about establishing once-and-for-all the superiority of crustaceans over humans.
With World War II so fresh in everyone’s memories, I suppose this was one more reference to Hitler’s ridiculous ideas about racial superiority.
I think the Pennsylvania Amish secretly rule the world. How about you?