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| I could only take the
cheapest way on the ferry. A big room with 16-50 other people. I was
in the 16 person room and not so bad, though sleeping on the floor was
a bit rough. |
When I arrived they told
me I would be staying at the Fuji ryokan temporarily. I got there
early by three days so the lady said I had to sleep in the
"cafeteria". Well that's fine I guess. But then Monday, the day from
which I had paid for a regular room, she said I would have to be here
all week, I politely said no. |
One of the class members
walked into my room, because it was the cafeteria and had no door,
when I popped up he asked if I wanted to go to the park with him and
meet some other people. I went and we all drank some beer at the beer
gardens. One guy ordered a 6 foot tall beer as seen here. |
Saturday I met up with
Amanda, Derrick, and Amanda's sister and we did some non-5 foot deep
snow sight seeing. This is the American style old government building. |
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| This is the famous clock
tower. Famous because it was brought over from the US a hundred years
ago. So it's not that interesting to Americans. |
In the park when it's not
freezing there is always something going on. Since everyone in Japan
wants to be a talk show host, people will gather and be entertained by
people trying to catch a break. |
In the street there was a
special dance festival. |
After the dancing they
carried around this portable shrine. |
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| During the summer festival
beer factories set up massive beer gardens and hundreds of people
would come and drink all night long. |
Saturday night the 4 of us
went to the famous Sapporo Beer Factory and had what's called Ghengis
Khan. It's shown in the next few pictures. |
We had two little grills
at the table and on the grills we would put..... |
Meat and veggies and wash
it down with beer. |
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| The four of us went around
Hokkaido in search of National parks and would just stay in a tent
somewhere. It was fun not having a plan. I think I am going to buy a
tent now. |
I was driving and went
down this road, at night, about a mile. Then it dead ended and I had
to go in reverse all the way back to the gate. |
Here we are stinking and
ready to leave the next day. |
One of our destinations
was the Fuano Lavender fields. We had just missed the prettiest
blooms, but they were all still nice. |
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| Some typical wrong English we
found along the way. It's either wrong, or just doesn't make sense, or
just sounds odd like the peach ad. |
A human friendly fox
waiting for food. He didn't even care about the car of people behind
him. |
Us halfway through the
volcano hike. |
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| Directions were written on
rocks, but sometimes they were hard to find. |
It's common for people to
stack stones like this and here Derrick is passing along the
tradition. |
Near the top we were in a
cloud and one couldn't see the path ahead sometimes. |
There was old writing on
the stones in old kanji. Maybe it was written last week by someone who
knew old kanji. |
