mmm Dericous!
Saturday, 13 November 2004
We went to see Mount Fuji the other day. Its a big mountain with snow on top and all that. Just so you can visualise it we will put a picture and our three part video diary of mount fuji on the website when we find a place with the relevant technology. Joe if you read this I think you would be proud of my camera techniques. The area around it has the air of a deserted english seaside town.
It was well worth going though cos we ended up having to stay in a mini ryokan type place with its own communal hot spring bath. We stayed in a tatami mat room and this old Japanese woman in a kimono shooed us around the place. Its quite regimented in those places and you are expected to have a bath and eat with the other guests, for dan that is probably the equivalent of having a smeer test in an auditorium full of everone you have ever known so he wasnt liking it at all, I did think he was going to cry at one point and he just bolted and wandered around the cold dark village for a few hours while I attempted to join in with the culture. The bath was wicked, and noone else was in it so I got to splash around like a fat little seal for about half an hour (sadly there has been no weight loss on my part, mainly down to me eating everything on the grounds that either I recognise it and may not find anything that seems ok again for a while, or I dont recognise it and therefore classify it a cultural). THe next thing that happens in the minishuku is you have to go to the meal in your woefully small kimono style dressing gown. Throughout the meal the woman kept coming up and pointing to dans food with gestures of whats happened? I returned them with what I hope were gesture of "hes sick and has gone to the chemist for drugs". Raw fish turns out to be acutally quite nice, though I reckon its better put in a pie. Most of the food was really nice but probably not what I would choose normally. There was an elevated plate of cabage, beansprouts and raw fatty meat which looked foul you had to light the candle thing underneath and cook it. It was still pretty rank though. All in all it was quite good, but devastatingly expensive.
