For the past two days, we've been in Yachiyo - a beautiful mountainside campus about 1.5 hours by bus from Hiroshima. Even in the "country", I'm struck by how developed Japan is. Everything is pristine, awesome even, and then a giant powerline tower mars the face of a mountainside. Thankfully, Yachiyo is free from such distractions. The trip to Yachiyo was a lot of fun.
We arrived at Yachiyo after a shortened school day, showing up just about 5 PM. The teacher who runs the facility, Yamana-sensei, greeted us at the door. The campus climbs the mountainside, with winding trails culminating in handbuilt cabins - everything here is hand made from wood. We enter the giant conference center style building - a place where I'm told they hold class on longer trips - and get introduced to everyone. We also meet Ryo, the assistant, who is a cool guy in his own right. After introductions, we get down to the serious business of eating.
This whole trip revolves around food, or at least it seemed so to me. They have an amazing outdoor kitchen in Yachiyo - 4 woodburning bread ovens, 4 long sinks, 4 giant propane burners, and two halfbarrel charcoal grills. They make their own charcoal for the grills here, an incredibly difficult process. For our first meal in Yachiyo, we cook Japanese BBQ. Japanese BBQ involves placing thinly sliced meat pieces on a blazing hot grill, cooking them in a few minutes. It requires a good eye and a lot of flipping. The grills also had peppers, onions, and eggplant on them. After you cook the meat and vegitables, you just take the ones you want off the grill, dip them in your sweetened soy sauce base that you carry in your bowl, and eat. It's delicious. Grace brought some food to make s'mores with, a treat the Japanese kids had yet to have. After eating, we cleaned up and then broke out the fireworks - hanabi - which was great fun. I love fireworks. We then shuffled off to bed, a long day ahead of us. The waterworks they had set up there made deep knocking noises all night - music to fall asleep to.
The morning of the 19th dawned chilly and a bit moist. This however soon burned off under a cloudless sky. I had told Katsu-sensei that I liked to bake before, so she designated me the go to man for the breakfast - pizza, Japanese style. The crust is made much the same, and I had a chance to demonstrate how to toss a pizza. Then, after sauce and cheese, everything is different. Most of the pizzas had a mix of corn, cabbage, squid, prawns, and salmon, a combination that actually turned out well. We also threw onions, tomatos, peppers and the such on some of the others. These were then baked in the wonderful woodburning ovens - making the crust crispy and the cheese well-melted. In a word - perfect.
After cooking and cleaning up, we then prepared to do the work part of the experience - trailbuilding! This is one of the manual tasks I really enjoy. I especially like it when they give me the chainsaw. I love chainsaws. After about an hour of trail building, we went back down the mountain to the woodworking shop. There, we cut our names in Katakana out of wood and mounted them. Woodworking is lots of fun. We also got to see lots of Yamana-sensei's woodwork. He hand-carved an incredible amount of stuff - everything from F1 racing cars to musical instruments. After commenting on how nice the work on one of his flutes was, he handed it to me and told me to take it - my first real Japanese handicraft.
We then went to eat again. This time, a traditional Japanese treat - floating somen. Somen noodles are floated down a bamboo pipe, and you reach in to the water with chopsticks and snag some. You then dip them in soy sauce and eat them. Always tasty. We also had a bit more Japanese BBQ, firing up the grills again to try and finish off the meat we brought.
After lunch, we walked a short distance down the road to ride bikes around a dam lake. This was also lots of fun, even though the trail was closed off a short distance down. It had lots of blind corners, fast straightaways and big hills - a great trail! Exhausted, we drove back to the HIT campus then made the trek back to the apartment.
After a short nap and a well-deserved shower, Ben and I took a walk away from the mountains. We ended up at the largest river in Hiroshima, about a quarter-mile across, maybe more. I'll bring a camera next time and get some pictures.