At the very beginning of October, the AKP program had an overnight field trip! We got a bus (basically, half filled with students, and half filled with staff and their families), and went to all sorts of places. Starting very early on Friday (as in, leaving Kyoto Station at 8, which means that most of us had to leave our homestay houses closer to 7), we set out in the general direction of Northwest, towards the northern coast of Hyogo Prefecture.
First, we went to a small town in the middle of nowhere that was really famous for soba, and made our own soba from scratch, and then ate it and wandered around for a while and saw the town's famous clock tower and ate matcha ice cream and Tat fed matcha ice cream to the fish (I'm not so sure that this was good for the fish, but they liked it well enough!).
Making soba is hard work. It involves getting flour (mixed buckwheat and regular, but we were given the flour pre-mixed) a little with water, then stirring it with your hands and getting all sticky, then kneading it until your hands hurt, then rolling it out flat, then rolling it out flatter, then rolling it out even flatter, until it's only like half a millimeter thick, and then folding this giant slab of really thin dough (I swear, the ingredients must have somehow multiplied to cover so much space) over itself a couple times, and taking a giant butcher knife to it to cut off really thin noodle-thickness slices. We did this in groups of 4 or 5 and we were all a little sore by the time we were done. Then the noodles got cooked (not by us), and we ate them. To eat soba, you dip it in sauce--this region has a special, unusual sauce recipe, which involves mixing the normal tsuyu (dipping sauce) with raw egg, green onions, and ground up potato. It was reasonably tasty, though the potato made it rather goopy. After eating the soba, you were supposed to pour the hot soba cooking water into the sauce and drink it, but most of us were either too squeamish about drinking near-raw egg (the broth wasn't hot enough to cook it), or too full to even consider putting more in our stomachs (so much soba!).
Then, we continued. Next we went to a rice cracker factory. They fed us little rice cakes and tea, then let us go on a nice little self-guided tour from an observation platform that let you see all the different rooms of rice cakes being made. Unfortunately, most of the stuff wasn't actually running, so it was mostly just rooms with lots of unmoving machinery. But in the last room on the end, the machines were grinding rice into a pulp and pounding the pulp into mochi, then giving the giant balls of mochi to two workers to cut into smaller chunks for further rice-cake-making.
Finally, we went back on the bus and continued to Kinosaki. Kinosaki is famous for its onsen. Onsen are natural hot springs, which have been used in Japan for centuries. Often, a given onsen advertises some kind of special property of their water where you're supposed to get something good if you bathe in it; these range from "This will help your arthritis!" to "You'll be able to see better!" to "You'll fall in love!" to "You'll get rich!". We stayed the night at an onsen resort--basically, a hotel within walking distance of 7 different onsen, with another one in the building itself, and a free pass to visit all of them for the duration of your stay. This is a wonderful concept. I spent the late afternoon and evening walking around in a yukata (and flats--unfortunately they do NOT carry geta in my shoe size, not that it's really a surprise) going to sit around naked with a bunch of other women in very hot water. We visited 5 in total that night, before they closed at 11--a feat that won us a prize at the hotel (I got chopsticks!).
We also ate a really, really fancy dinner at the hotel. As in, several courses, crab and sashimi and shabu shabu and soup and onsen tamago and all sorts of fancy foods, three different little samples of desserts, wayyy more food than any of us should have eaten, all presented on your own personal table-tray with each dish on its own little fancy plate and people coming and going serving food, taking dishes, etc. I cannot actually describe this meal because there were too many things in it. I was still mostly full in the morning, and then they repeated the whole thing (less fancy but still soo many foods) in the morning for breakfast, when they had like three kinds of fish and also rice and pickles and miso soup and yakitamago and so many things. @.@ I couldn't actually eat more than a couple bites of breakfast; it was too overwhelming for my already-so-full stomach.
In the morning, again pretty early, we got on the bus again. This time we drove to Ama-no-hashidate--one of the famous 'This is a place with beautiful scenery!' places in Japan. The name means something along the lines of 'heavenly bridge'. We got out there and found out that the whole 'bridge' thing was actually literal--it's a giant bay with a land bridge cutting straight across from one side to the other. There's a cable car going up the mountain by it so people can get a better view; we rode up and went to the observation platform, where we were instructed to stand facing away from the bay, then bend over and look at it upside down from through our legs. (There was even a poster with Doraemon demonstrating!) The idea is that, when you do this, it actually looks like the land bridge is going up to somewhere in the clouds. The reality is, you get to laugh at your friends peering through their legs trying to figure out exactly what they're supposed to be looking for. Once we figured that out, most of us did see it (many of us also figured out the easier alternative of turn your camera upside down and take a picture so you can look at it without worrying about your butt being in anyone's face).
Then we split up and wandered around for a while. I climbed a mountain to a temple--a one kilometer or so walk up, and then back--only to realize there was actually a bus that took people back and forth from the cable car anyways. XD Then we took a chairlift back down, and went out on the bridge to see the beach. The bridge is lined with a rocky beach on one shore; the other side just has an edge, then water. In between is a long, thin park-like area with lots of beautiful pine trees. The contrast between the pine trees, the beach, and the water is considered very beautiful. It was actually a really peaceful place, until we started trying to skip rocks; we were really successful for a while, until this very small child came along and decided to copy us, but didn't quite figure out the process and accidentally threw a rock at one of the other AKP student's head instead. Then, we went and got lunch, and got back on the bus.
Our final stop was in Kobe, which is where we got dinner. We went to Nankin-machi, the Chinatown of Kobe, and ate delicious food from street vendors and went shopping and took pictures. Then, we got back on the bus to head home. On the bus, we played bingo, and I won something called やわらか焼き (yawarakayaki, which translates as something like soft-baked-thing), which turned out to be something like a pancake version of カステラ (casutera, a honey cake thing). We got back to Kyoto Station around, what, 8PM? and returned to our respective host families, exhausted from being really busy and not really sleeping for two days.
And that was our fall trip. It was very exciting.
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