Shizukuishi

A friend of mine who lives in the neighbouring prefecture of Iwate asked me to organise a group of people to evaluate a doburoku tour that he wishes to offer as a service to tourists to the area. Doburoku (濁酒) is basically home make sake.

So on February 6th a group of 16 of us went to Shizukuishi. Some of us went up early and had time to visit the Snow Festival at Koiwai Farm, the largest private general farm in Japan. It was pretty impressive too. There were all sorts of snow sculptures.


This was a line of snow restaurants you could go into and have lunch!


We then went to Minshuku Nakagawa (民宿なかがわ) for our hands-on doburoku making experience! The owner Mr. Nakagawa everything he was doing in detail and my friends wife Miho translated for us. It seemed pretty easy. Steam rice, let it cool, add some stuff and keep it in a barrel with the temperature maintained between 10 and 20 degrees for about a week. After that you have a load of doburoku!

Before dinner started a few of us decided to go to an onsen. The closest one was Yukotan no Mori (ゆとかんの森). After showering and warming up in the inside bath, myself and Austin headed for the rotemburo (outside bath). We had to go out into the hall and down some stairs. I slipped going down the oddly shaped steps and bounced awkwardly and painfully down the last 3 or 4 steps. Embarrassed and bleeding I got up and tried to stop my elbow from bleeding. We continued into the onsen to meet the other 3 guys we were with and found that 2 of them had also slipped on the stairs! We compared injuries; my blood clinched the victory!

We headed back to the minshuku for a dinner of a huge variety of local mountain dishes. It was delicious. And we got to drink as much as we wanted, for 4 hours!


Then some of us put on our snowboarding gear and went outside for snow sumo!

The next morning after breakfast we realised first that one of the drivers had lost his car keys while playing snow sumo, and that another person had lost a camera. So we were all running around looking for keys and cameras, sifting through snow in all the places we remembered playing sumo - which turned out to have been many places! Eventually Austin randomly kicked a bank of snow on the side of the road, the one created by the snowploughs after clearing the roads, and the spot he kicked just so happened to be where the keys were buried in the snow! Lucky!!!

We finally left and headed to Shizukuishi Ski Resort for the day. It's a nice big ski jo with plenty of long runs, steep inclines, and plenty of black courses to enjoy!

Winter Holidays

In Japan, Christmas day is not a national holiday. Many of the foreigners here take holidays and travel. That's what I did last year when I went to Taiwan. But this year I decided to stay in Honjo.

On Christmas Eve, Chika an myself went out for a romantic dinner at a local Indonesian restaurant. And then headed to a darts bar where we were given "Christmas" Cheese cake and hot sake from the staff. Later we were given the more traditional strawberry and cream style "Christmas" cake from random customers drinking in the bar.


Christmas day was a Friday, and it just happened to be the last day of school before before winter holidays. And after a normal day at school, all the teachers had an end of year drinking party that night. The party started at 5:30 and we had a 4 hour all-you-can-drink and more food than we could possible eat!

I brought along a small Christmas cake that my mother sent me (thanks Mam!), and we gave it to the staff at the izakaya, where the party was, to cut up for us. This is how my tiny slice was beautifully presented to me; on a long plate with icing sugar sprinkled like snow, Santa sitting in some cream, with his footprints precisely marked into the "snow" and a random thing on top of the cake (I can't remember what that was...).


After our 4 hour drinking time expired, we headed off to our second party, where we all got boob shaped chocolate on our tables. It was a karaoke bar that had, for some reason unknown to me, garments and wigs that you could dress up in before you got on stage to sing! And as our group was pretty drunk at this stage two teachers were more than happy to dress up!


The previous week I had dressed up as Santa for a kids party and as a thank you from the organiser I got a smoked turkey leg. So on St. Stephen's Day I cooked myself up as best a Christmas dinner as I could! For some reason the turkey looked and tasted like ham, so it was kindof like having turkey and ham?!


On January 2nd Patrice, a girl I shared a house with in Limerick for a few years, came to visit on her way home from Australia. I always love when people from Ireland come to visit! It's nice to hear stories about home and be able to speak about stuff that only Irish people are familiar with; the latest Gift Grub etc.

We travelled around a bit while she was here. We visited the local sights Yurihonjo has to offer; the jizo's, the buddha. Chika joined us when we travelled to the neighbouring prefecture to visit the sand onsen and a cave onsen; anayukko (穴ゆっこ).


We went to Zao in Yamagata for 3 days. We went snowboarding in Zao Liza World and rode the Zao rope-way though the weather was very bad for both. We also visited one of the best nicest onsens I've ever been to; shinzaemon onsen (新左衛門の湯).


Two days after Patrice left I went to Tazawako Ski Jo for the weekend with two other guys from Akita. The weather was good though visibility of the lake was minimal.

Fun times!