july 9

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July 9, 2006

Got up in Miyajima, rode the train for near 3 hours, and arrived in Yamaguchi. I was considering skipping Yamaguchi because it was a little out of the way, but I decided to give it a shot just because. I’m very glad I did. Yamaguchi has a population of about 1.5 million people, and it by far, the coolest place I’ve been thus far.

When I arrived at the station, I walked into the visitor information office attached to the station. The woman behind the desk is probably one of the nicest people I’ve met yet in Japan. We talked about Yamaguchi, Georgia, her job (which is a high school teacher as well as working at the visitor info office), my stay in japan, and a few other topics. She knew English well enough that I could fall back to if I ever got stuck, and she made sure to talk at a speed and level that I could understand. She was really cool. Instead of taking the bus, I decided to walk everywhere today. The first place I visited was lunch. I had missed breakfast so I went to an awesome Japanese noodle restraint that the receptionist had recommended. I got a bowl of soba noodles with really a really well spiced beef. There was also an all you can eat bar on the side, that was free with the meal, in case the noodles didn’t fill you up. I had two helpings.

Afterwards, I walked along the river front which led up to the next spot I wanted to see. It was a beautiful river lined with cherry trees. I wish I could have seen it when the cherry trees were in bloom. Afterwards, I went to Kozan park. The park wasn’t all that impressive in itself, but it offered free tour guides. When I walked in, a Japanese man approached me and asked if I wanted a tour guide. He didn’t really speak English, but I said sure and off we went. We walked around the park, and he pointed out several sites and did his best to convey the points he was trying to make. I had to break out the dictionary a couple of times, and we had to make up a few words to describe what he was talking about. But, we made it. While we were walking to each site, he would break out into conversation. A really cool guy. There were about 6 other tour guides that pulled us aside to show us a few types of random mushrooms that they had just found. Kinda random, but they were funny. After the tour, I met again with the rest of the tour guides. They kinda reminded me off Aunts and Uncles and were all very different although really cool. It’s kinda hard to explain, but just know that they were cool.

After that, I went to Joeiji temple which had by far the coolest garden I’ve seen yet. I’ll have to show you the pictures later. The lady at the front desk offered to fill my empty tea bottle with fresh tea, which I thought was really cool.

After that, I walked about 2-3 to the YH. This YH is by far the coolest YH yet. I’ve only found 2 downsides about it so far. The first is that it was a good bit off the beaten path, although I should have taken the bus here. Secondly, they left all the doors open so the place is crawling with bugs at the moment. The people here are cool, I have a big room to myself, they knocked on my door earlier and asked if they could prepare me some tea and ice cream, when I told them I was going to watch the world cup final at 3am, they said they I could delay breakfast until closer to 10, they are driving me to the train station after breakfast, there is free internet.

Yamaguchi is cool.

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