Carpe Diem Episode Two

To really get the full feeling for the blog you should start down a little bit. Sorry for such long posts!
So mountains:

For the past few weeks we've had days off on Monday so the long weekend has bred wanderlust. Thankfully our Vice Principal is awesome and decided that since we both like hiking (and we certainly know how crazy Bob is about mountains and the climbing or mountains) that he would take the two of us out hiking. Now, I'm not ashamed to say that I'm pretty good at climbing. I may not have as much stamina as the next little person but I don't mind climbing. Per se.
See, these mountains are basically the steroided version of regular mountains in America. You know when you're going along the mountain roads in West Virginia and Pennsylvania and you feel like you're going to die because the paths are just so narrow?
So there's what's awaiting you on the other side of the path, one misstep away.
I can't even attempt to tell you how scary it was for me (or how beautiful) but I'll try.
I've been getting better with my fear of heights (when did I get that anyway? ::shrug::) but it certainly helps that there's just such a beautiful mountain to get over it on. The trip up was a pretty steady climb of almost straight up which pretty much looked like this:



And that kind of foggy atmosphere in the bottom two pictures? THOSE ARE CLOUDS. That's right, we climbed so high on this mountain that we were in the clouds. FRIGGIN'SWEET.
Want further proof? It's all in the pictures:




Now that last part was the final climb up to the top of the mountain where we were greeted by a little shrine (and some seeded grapes from Ohara-sensei). The thing I love about these shrines is that while being sacred they're also kind of a part of your everyday life so you can sit right up next to them and not have that same wonder and awe and standoffishness of other religious emblems and statues.


And of course that's our wet selves at the top of the mountain because it actually started raining on us a little bit.
In fact, because the weather started to change on us a little bit we decided to head off our travels and head down the mountain early.
Where we've been (the King's Nose) and where we're going (back down of course - does that ever have a name besides base of the mountain?).
On the way down, besides marvelous views and me crying from the sheer beauty of everything we found something very curious. First a beautiful view and then a curious thing.


It's some sort of memorial, but what's curious isn't the memorial itself but the hat that was cosied on a post near the memorial. Ohara-sensei turned to us and simply said "It's waiting." And THAT is enough to crack anyone up to see a oldish Japanese man very calmly state that the hat is waiting for its owner to come back and then burst full wrinkled into a full-faced smile. Ohara is awesome.
Some videos to entice your interest. This first one is a video of the surroundings on the almost halfway up the top of the mountain.



Next we have a rather interesting video (and not because it almost seemed to be about Bob's feet before I figured out not everyone is attracted to his legs like I am) but because of the music in the background. It's important when you're on the mountain to have some sort of noise, like music or bells to make sure the bears aren't surprised by your sudden appearance (and vice versa). Most of the people wore bells which just reminded me of sheep being herded on the mountain but we were graced with a language teaching program which happened to be teaching phrases from a Chinese opera. Awesome!



The next thing I'd like to share is a video of something curious. We didn't see many animals (the radio made sure of that) but we did see what looked curiously like deer.
It's actually called a Japanese Serow and looks a bit like this if you can get up close:
This one that we saw on the mountain
happened to have a baby with it. At first
you weren't really sure what you were
looking at because it wasn't moving at all
and was just kind of staring.
Once we got close though they sprang into
action and left us in the dust.








That's pretty much all for me. We actually went up two mountains but the pictures and videos from this blog entry are all about Utsukushiigahara Yama(美ヶ原山) which translates roughly into The Fields of Beauty Mountain. Not next time (I have to continue the Carpe Diem series!) but relatively soon I'd like to write an entry about this past weekend when we went mountain climbing for four hours (Utsukushiigahara only took us three hours lol) up Eboshi Dake and Yuunomaru Yama: two very famous mountains in Nagano and especially famous for me because they might have personally caused the decrease in my thigh diameter.
On to the final entry~!