ユキと雪ゆき (Bound for Snow with Yuki)

[Amusing language note: the title of this post is pronounced yuki to yuki yuki, Yuki being the name of my friend, the word for "snow", and the word for "destination", as used on train and bus tickets.]

I have a few minutes of rest amongst the storm of December so I figured I would make a neat little post about a specific trip I had - a first for this blog? Possibly.


Last weekend Brittany and I went to Nagano with our friend Yuki, who is super cute and friendly and invited us to stay with her family in Omachi, a town in the north-western part of Nagano prefecture.

Nagano all together was really nice. It's about time I saw some Japanese countryside. The air was crisp and fresh, and it was cold, but not piercingly cold. With sufficient layers, we were totally comfortable.

Yuki's family was soooo nice and accommodating. They made us feel totally at home, gave us huge amounts of home-made food for dinner, chatted with us, and even paid for our onsen trip. They made the trip so smooth, something you often lack if you travel alone.

We did various things:

• Went to Matsumoto castle, one of the oldest castles still in its original form. It had really neat details on its unique building structure with multiply layered floors (like, a floor 1.5) and a lot of info on the evolution of rifles. They were apparently used a lot to defend this castle.

• We ate Nagano specialties: oyaki and soba. Oyaki are like nikuman but without meat and with thicker, tougher bread. The oyaki place we went to had crazy flavours. I had anko and walnut miso. They were delicious. As for the soba, I had kamonanban, which is basically duck and leeks. It was delicious.
• We saw the first snow of this year (for us). We had a snowball fight in the bus station with the meager amount we could scrape up. 
• We went to an onsen, a first time for me. The sensation was so profound that I nearly fainted a few times and I felt like I had heat stroke, but afterwards I was the chillest dude around. I felt sooooo relaxed.
• We woke up early to see Nagano's northern Alps. Then, it was cloudy, so we hung out around the kotatsu and went a few hours later. And... wow.

• Much of Yuki's family (siblings, grandparents, other relations) all live in the same little neighbourhood, which was confined to the side of a mountain. We drove past her grandparents' rice paddies (which were situated on a hill... looked difficult) and met her grandmother who gave us apples. Then we met her goat.

• We went to an alpine museum which had stuffed animals inside and live animals outside! Only stuffed monkeys, though. I was not lucky enough to see the real thing. I did, however, see a kite, a raccoon dog, a civet, and a serow.

• We saw biscuits with bees baked into them. Just... bees. Wings and all. On the way back, we saw snack packs of whole crickets, too. They were basted in some sort of sauce. Looked crunchy. People from Nagano are weird.

On the way back, all the Meitetsu trains were down due to a power outage. Even Yuki said she'd never seen this before. Lucky us! Thankfully, we arrived in the absolutely packed Nagoya station about 2 hours after the power outage had occurred and only had to wait 15-20 minutes before things were back in order.

All in all really cool. There isn't anything super famous in Nagano (save the Olympic site which we never even visited) but the trip was really fun and we saw/did some cool things. It was a good breath of fresh air before diving headlong into the typhoon of next week and the people-infested city of Tokyo.

Wish me luck!