Golden Week pt2 - meeting Emi's Mother

On Thursday 1st May I met Emi's mother.

We met at Isetan department store in Sagami-hara at 12:30 for lunch. We ate in a meat resturant (not sure what type of resturant to call it) where Emi's mother had steak, I had some sort of Japanese mince beef crocket and Emi had some mix thing.


Anyway Emi's mother opens her bag and grabs a load of papers. Turns out she has brought every email or peice of info Emi has ever sent her mother! Basically we went through some of Emi's emails and I elaborate on what info she had - where I worked, family etc. She seemed fine about everything although she came across very shy, basically I think because of her English. She said a few words but basically spoke in Japanese and Emi translated.


After lunch we popped in to say hello to Emi's sister, she works on the ground floor (or 1st floor in Japan, they do not have a ground floor) and then off to the local park. Emi's mother is a bit of a pro-am photographer and we spent the next 30 or 40 minutes taking pictures of each other, you can see one of them here.

Friday Emi and I headed off to Fuji-Q highlands. Got up late and ended up arriving there at about 10:30am. We went straight to queue for Eejanaika (waited 90 minutes), this is the most awesome roller coaster in the world. Basically as well as running on a track that loops and twists the train can also rotate so you are traveling forwards, then backwards, right way up and upside down. Words cannot describe how good it is be here is a good try:

http://eejanaika.jp/
Click on the video and watch.

After we got off to went to grab some lunch and half way through a tasty carbonara the heavens openned. "Yipppy, no queues" I thought and we went to the oposite side of the park to wait to ride Fujiyama - incidentally it was the tallest and one of the fastest coasters about 5 years ago, still is one of even now. The queue was short and thing were looking good until they anounced it was closing because the rain was too heavy, poo! Shortly afterwards all the other big rides closed so we rode the Merry-go-round and then headed home.

In the evening we watch a really interesting film - Malcom X starring Densiel Washington. I knew of Malcom X but didn't really know anything about him. basically he started off as a bit of a player - happy-go-lucky then ladies man and gambler (with the wrong people), headed off to prison and meeting a man there converted him to Islam, although the "wrong type" of Islam. A will not say anthing else than I recommend to watch. Do however plan plenty of snacks and look breaks, it is a long 3 hours and 20 minutes long.

On Saturday we didn't do much, the only thing I wrote down was that Emi thought me how to play Othello!


Sunday 4th we went to Miyagase, a huge lake created by a dam. Very pretty and very busy as it was "Boy's day", a sort of national holiday. For the feminists out there there is also a "Girl's day". In the evening Emi made a very tasty Curry!


Monday 5th Emi and I went to meet a couple of her school friends that she hadn't met in a while. We met at Enoshima and went to lunch at a very nice resturant - I should think so having to wait 1 hour when we were all starving! After a tasty lunch we headed off to Enoshima Aquarium. There were plenty of cute pengiuns, gratious seals, floaty gelly fish and of course a show. Usually is a couple of bottle nose dolphins and maybe a whale jumping through hoops and stuff - not this show! There were 3 bottle nose and one other dolphin. There was loads of naration, little action. the most boring part was when one of the guys sat on a float in the middle of the tank sat next to seal. He would speak for about 2 or 3 minutes and then get the seal to wave, another 2 or 3 minutes and another wave. When it finished I wne to leave and Emi's friends said "lets stay for the next show", err ok then...


Now the Japanese are like Germans on holiday, they have to be early and "get their towels down". In this case we sat for 90 minutes before the next show started. Very quickly I thought some one had spiked my drink with LSD and fed me some hash cookies - it was the most bizzare water show ever! Basically there 4 girls in these strange half-wetsuit-half-dress clothes were singing and dancing and the occasional dolphin did a flip or something in time with the music. It was one of the strangest 45 minutes of my life and I ask Emi afterwards "di you just she what I saw", "YES, very good wasn't is" she said. I was certainly interesting!


Tuesday was a relax day, nothing to report. The day after was back to work, boo!

Golden Week pt1 - meeting Emi's Father!

First of all I will explain what Golden Week is. Basically 3 national holiday days are in a row so most companies take the whole week off work. Nissan's Golden Week is actually 1 week and 2 days!

Sunday night we headed off to Shinjuku to get an overnight bus. Arrived and we were looking for some people with red aprons. Couldn't see anyone although lots of other bus companies were there. Emi said "I always wait here for the bus, it's no problem". Thankfully I persisted as I had a gut feeling so Emi checked all the paper work. I was right! Off we ran with 5 minutes before the bus was to leave, thankfully it was only 1 minutes run away.

Got there, listened to the instructions, jumped on the bus and... only 1 seat! Turned out the idiot at the travel company had only ordered one seat and Emi was too tired when she made the order to realise. Thankfully they were really helpful - we got another bus and let me pay for my seat there and then on the phone with my credit card.









Arrived Monday morning at 6am. We visited load of places half of which I cannot remember so don't be supprised if I update this later. We went to Togetsukyo, Sagarashi Yama, Fukuji temple and Fushimi in the day. You can see some of these places from the pictures.





Fushimi is very famous because of its 10,000 red Japanese/Chinese gates and you might have seen it before as it was the setting for a scene in the film "Memiors of a Gaisha".




In the evening we ate in an Italian/Japanese resturnat, the food was fab but then it should be for 35 quid a head! (expensive for Japan)

Afterwards we went to a place called Shirakawa. Anyone that plays Gran Turismo 5 on PS3 will have seen this place, it is a small bridge over a river and is very pretty at night. And no, I am not sad visiting somewhere because it is in a computer game, it was Emi's suggestion!

Our hotel was a little odd but very nice in a olde worlde way, wasn't very expensive (especially considering it was in an expensive area of Kyoto - Gion - and was very close to Shirakawa and the super resturant)









Tuesday morning was Kiyomizudera. I visited this last time in Japan but if you do not know this temple on a hillside is the large wooden structure in the world, it even uses wooden nails.

After this we went to a place where you dress up in traditional Japanese clothing and have pictures taken. As you can see they look very good and Emi looks very pretty.

In the afternoon we went to Himeji Castle, this is outside of Kobe. The weather was brillient and castle was great although we were both very tired.

After this we met up with Emi's Father in the station and went to a Cafe for me to formally introduce myself and chat. To start I cocked up my introduction having introduced myself to 100's of people before, Emi explained we were both very tired. After this he said "I knew it was you in the station, I could see the sun shining off your head" and followed this with a roaring laugh. Once he stopped laughing and then spent the next 2 or 3 minutes apologiesing for insulting me!

Basically his only problem was that I am a deeply religious Christian whose fore-fathers killed in the name of religion in the crusades and Emi was a devout Budist. He also though we would have many cultural problems. 1) I'm not so deeply relgious and Emi isn't Budist and 2) I said we could work through the problems to which he said "of course you will say that now, you are in love! What about in 30, 40, 50 years from now?" - he doesn't know we have been living together for 3 months so have ironed out a number of issues already.

That's the end of part 1 for now...