Sunday, 11 June 2006

Last night we drove up to Minakami and went to a full moon party with a bunch of other gaijin and some Japanese friends.

Minakami is absolutely breathtakingly beautiful and in winter it is apparently an excellent location for skiing and snowboarding. It's mountainous and green and has the most gorgeous river running through it.

We didn't get there until about 9ish and Aki had arranged accomodation for all of us in a guest house just down the road from the party. There were about 15 of us all together - us four girls, Kevin, Nick, Aki and three of her friends, Heather from Maebashi and a bunch of miscellaneous guys from Isesaki and Maebashi. Heather and I straggled home at about 3am and the rest trailed in after that.

Heather and I got up early and went for a walk along the river. My photos don't really do the place justice. It's pretty spectacular.

Here's Heather and I standing in the rain by the river in Minakami.

The river in Minakami is the most beautiful colour.

After our wander around Minakami, we went back to the guest house and asked the landlady if we could get some coffee. "No problem", she said (in Japanese obviously) and offered us a choice of two types of instant coffee. That's ok, I thought, I can handle instant coffee. What I didn't count on was the unspeakably vile beverage in a coffee cup that was given to me to drink. How she managed to make unremarkable instant coffee into a cup of pure evil is beyond me. Anyway, I forced it down and then we all drove home and I watched TV for the rest of the afternoon.