onwards to mt fuji! (hakone area)
figured out how to get there in the morning by JR lines. it’s not -tooooo- far away, but, yea.
headed to tokyo station to take the shinkansen bullet train to odawara where we buy a hakone pass to travel around that area at no extra cost… there are several shops inside the station so grabbing food before we got on was easy. i bought a fruit cup that turned out to be yogurt. oops.
our first ride on the shinkansen, kodama trains, the seats are split as pairs on one side, 3’s on the other. the chairs are similar to airplane seats but with more space and no touchscreen… haha, maybe like a go bus? meh. either way, it was a nice experience.
when we got to odawara, leon spotted something going on outside. a group of people were parading down the street while carrying a small shrine, we think it’s part of the children’s day festivities… or something about community and protection. there were also paper wards hung on rope everywhere along houses and shops, something about keeping out evil? my guess anyways. 😛
anyways, at odawara station, we saw a large bookstore so we decided to make a stop there. for memory’s sake, and interest, i bought the latest of three manga that i love, hunter x hunter, one piece, and fairy tale. although i can’t really read the kanji, the small katakana/hiragana is there so i can at least practice my reading……….. right.
and we headed off to find the hakone pass. since it was a festival day, the stations were very busy, not… crowded, but busy. we found the tourist info centre and because it was already late and the weather was pretty crappy, we decided to stay in the area of odawara. she showed us a webcam feed of the lake+mt fuji and the view was very bad :S… bad season i guess.
so yea. we decided to stay in the odawara area, there was a small jazz festival in the park beside the odawara castle. the park had japanese macques 0.o or somethin like that, monkeys. lol… and they had a young indian elephant too :S that was a bit sad… it’s not really a zoo area so it was only monkeys and an elephant in a random area… anyways. the castle had been converted into a museum holding all the stuff about the castle, some interesting stuff actually. they were displaying weapons used in the battles too, the craziest one was the chain and sickle. yikes. the view at the top was preeeeety nice but there were a lot of clouds.
after we left, we walked around… semi-aimlessly. leon wanted to see the ‘route 1’ which used to be the tokkaido trail between tokyo and kyoto, now jsut a road. it sucks how we just missed the cherry blossom season, although there were many cherry blossom trees, no blossoms 🙁
leon sorta led us to the beach area south of route 1, there was a small alleyway that u could see the water from, but no one was really sure if it led there. but it did 😛 haha… the breeze was really nice and there were people fishing too.
we then started to head back, find somewhere to eat, and get back earlier than normal. finding somewhere to eat is always a challenge :S so much to choose from which keeping the prices in mind and stuff. my stupid cibc account needs me to reset the password cause i couldnt remember the stupid security question answer :@ gotta do that before i max out my credit card… lol. (i’ve spent a lot already on random shit.) we ended up at a yoshinoya 0.o or somehtin, it’s a chain of chicken and pork rice dishes…. fast food! haha
when we got back, we finally went to get our free drink. (each person staying gets a complimentary drink :D) so we got our drink, a half pint of super dry asahi, not bad at all… easier drink for me. we met up with masaki again, he’s pretty cool, lol… and he was just talking about he did that day and he mentioned batting cages. leon got excited. ahahha.
and thats exactly where we went. i played 3 sessions of batting and one of pitching. my pitching sucks 🙁 when i pitched when i was younger it was like a tennis ball and half the distance… lol. i wasn’t tooooo bad at batting though, i had one with full contact, others were crappier hits. masaki and michelle then played a balance the ball game where they both stood on a big board-thing and controlled it. they almost won >_<. leon and masaki then played some air hockey, on a small table and leon got mad. lol, not really, but he lost. hahah. headed downstairs of the 'rox dome' and into some more gaming stuff. masaki won michelle and stitch peanut doll from the evil clamp machines. there are a bunch of games that use cards as the 'pieces' which is pretty awesome. so if u have a good deck, you can win a lot, it's crazy but seems old at the same time. altho i havent seen any of that in toronto.
and then we went to mos burger. japanese burgers, where burgers are their lives. haha. they cost about 3$ and are actually pretty small, but it's still pretty good. 24 hours! crazy. masaki got a rice mos burger where the friggen buns are made of rice, holy crap! but that was even smaller than ours. hahaha. aaaaand we went back to the hostel. 2 more days in tokyo~ it's been good!
one of the shrine thingys
the odawara castle
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