My last day in Japan was pretty rough. After a night of pretty heavy drinking I had to peddle my way to the Hikone train station so I could go with a few other people to Tsuruga, a pretty nice town at the Sea of Japan. I wasn't feeling too well to begin with because I had been up until probably 1 or 2 that morning, so I was tired to start. To put another little factor into it, I was feeling a little queasy because of all the drinking I did. So when I woke up in the morning I had absolutely no desire to eat any food. It was a bad choice, by about lunch time I was ready to fall over.
...but I'm getting ahead of myself. Tsuruga isn't too incredibly far away by train--I imagine it's about the same distance as Kyoto. The train goes through all these beautiful mountains, and rice fields, though, so the trip itself is pretty nice. We left early so we could get there before lunch and see the sights. When we got there we rented bicycles, and I'm telling you I might as well have had a scooter, the bikes were so small. My knees must have been up to my chest when I was pedaling. They were all right bikes, I suppose. None of the bikes broke down, and the only problems they really had were having noisy rear breaks and being too small.
Pedaling around Tsuruga wasn't easy, especially with a queasy stomach. It only got harder as it reached lunch time, though, because my body was finally telling me that I should have had something for breakfast and that if I didn't eat something soon I was going to fall over on my bike. Man, I'm never going without breakfast again, I swear. It was horrible. I thought it was kind of funny, though, how I was too hungry to have an urpy stomach by that time. So we ate at a ramen place, called Sapporo Ramen.
It was just a small local ramen shop, but I decided to take a picture of it when I was there. Every order cost the same: 600 yen, which isn't too bad considering what you get for it. I'm thinking everything cost the same because, well, for one none of the items were probably that much different and two, because there was just one guy working there and if he had to hand out weird amounts of change he'd probably flip out or never get anything done. It was a sorely needed meal, and little did I expect that it would be another 8 or 9 hours until I would eat again.
After we ate we went to a nice little rocky beach and just kind of hung out for an hour or two. It was really relaxing, and I even saw some jellyfish. Well, I shouldn't say some, I guess I should say "a whole bunch of jellyfish." There were all these blue-ish jellyfish washing up on the beach and floating around right there in the water... it was really interesting. Some people started poking them with sticks or helping them back into the sea. Well, whether the jellyfish were alive or dead at the time I couldn't tell... I don't think you can really tell with jellyfish because they don't do a whole lot of moving. After all that we just kind of sat around. I lay down on the sand and used my camera bag as a pillow and just kind of got some sun for a little while.
(while this picture really doesn't have anything to do with the beach, it's really the only picture I have of industrial stuff in Japan. From all the pictures I have you'd think Japan is nothing but trees and temples, but they are a modern nation, after all, and a leading economic world power. How can you expect a leading economic power to not require large amounts of lumber for the infrastructure? Anyway, it was pretty neat seeing all that stuff)
When we left the beach we accidenly left Jessica behind. We waited and looked for her for quite some time but never found her. From what I gather, sensei told the police that she was lost and they probably told all the officers to look for a blonde-haird blue-eyed American woman riding a bike around the city. Apparently she wasn't too difficult to spot as she safely returned home with sensei in the early evening.
So most of my last day in Japan was spent traveling around on tiny bikes, getting lots of sun and seeing lots of jellyfish. Later that day I would go to the mall one stop down the tracks from Hikone to spend just about all my money at the arcade. I figured I could eat at a restaurant that would take a credit card later, so I only saved about 400 yen after I was all done. Oh yeah, Japanese arcades are really expensive. It's 200 yen to start and 100 yen to continue, so $10 doesn't last any amount of time at all. They do have some pretty fun games, but unless you've got a lot of money to waste in your budget there's really nothing there that's cheap.
So what happened was that all of us who went to the mall walked home from Hikone station to kind of say "farewell" to such a pleasant place. I'm going to miss Japan, and I know I need to go back some time. I suppose I only have a couple options, though: I could teach English for a year or two after I get my degree or I could find a way to pay for my own vacation some time down the road to travel more over there. I'm pretty sure college credits won't apply to anything if I go back there for more study.
But it still was a lot of fun. I don't know if these web pages did justice to what I experienced, and I'm sure I'm missing some things. If you want to know something specific about what I did, feel free to contact me in any way. If you were one of the people there with me and you think I'm missing something, or maybe you just want to get in touch with me (although I really don't know why you'd want to do something like that) then by all means, do so.
Or, ah, I guess if your answer is "none of the above" then that's okay too. Well, I hope you enjoyed these photos! I'll leave with a nice little shot of the wave breaks at Lake Biwa.
