Kyoto, School, and Hiking - Busy Times!

A lot has happened since my last post, as usual. We had a great time in Kyoto. It was really nice the first few days we were there. The weather was nice and it was relatively warm. We were able to take lots of pictures and see some cool places. We went to a big market on the first day we were there and bought some household decoration type things. We also saw many temples like Kinkakuji and Kiyomizudera, and a really cool place called Fushimi shrine where there is a long, long pathway lined with thousands of torii gates. Kelly recorded a short video of it. It started to rain a few days into the trip which put a damper on the rest of our activities. Most of what you do when you are in Kyoto involves being outside, so we had to deal with it. Living in Japan, we have gotten very used to keeping an umbrella with us most of the time. I always used to prefer small, collapsible umbrellas, but now I like to use the bigger kind. They're more tedious to carry around, but when you spend a lot of time walking around outside in the rain, they're definitely more effective. We actually got into a good routine when we were sight-seeing and Kelly wanted to take a picture. I would go over to her and hold her umbrella over her while she took the picture. It worked out pretty well.

We ate a lot of really good food while we were there including what we both proclaimed to be the best sushi we have ever had at a place called Tomizushi. It was a very small restaurant, and we sat at the counter and just told the chef what we wanted when we were ready for something else, and he would make it right in front of us. It was so good and fresh and a great way to start our trip. Other interesting restaurants we ate at include a tofu restaurant where almost everything we ate was made from tofu and a delicious tempura restaurant where the tempura was cooked right in front of us. It was pretty amazing.

We put some pictures up on Flickr that we took with our iPhones during the trip and the rest will be up on Flickr eventually. I'm glad we got to go down there finally. It's one of the must-see places in Japan.

The new school year got rolling this past week. We had a big turnover of teachers, especially in the English department. We had 5 English teachers leave and 4 new ones come in plus one who returned from maternity leave (which can last years in Japan.) All of the new teachers seem very nice, so I'm looking forward to getting to teach with them. One of the teachers who left was Morita-sensei who was by far the most helpful person to the ALTs at our school. She was always willing to drop everything to help us even if she was in the middle of something. She even helped out Jeff and Gwynn when there was an unfortunate key incident during their visit. She will be missed greatly.

The new ichi-nensei are cute and small and nervous as usual. As well as extremely excited to be in high school. I'll have my first class with new students on Tuesday. Really looking forward to that. They are sure to make my last four months fun and exciting.

We had our last practice hike last night before the real deal in two weeks. Last night we did Checkpoint 7 to the Finish. Altogether it was only 20km, but it's a very difficult stretch. The people who designed this course decided it would be a good idea to put the most difficult sections right at the end. Why? I don't know. To be cruel, I guess. In the last 20 km there are three mountains that you have to climb up and then down. Basically it works like this. You start off from CP7 and walk along a gravel road for a while until you come to a mountain. You climb the mountain a long way. It's very steep in places and just an altogether long ascent. When you get to the top, you go back down the other side, as would be expected. A long, steep decline. At the bottom of the mountain is CP8. From CP8 you almost immediately start climbing another mountain. This mountain it extremely steep. There's even a section where there is a rope along the trail to hold on to to prevent falling backward. This was actually a nice change because it gives you a chance to use your arms for a bit rather than solely relying on your legs. You finally get to the top of the mountain and of course, you immediately go straight down. When you get to the bottom of the mountain, you cross a road and on the other side of the road? You guessed it! You start climbing another mountain. By the time we got to this mountain the sun had come up which made climbing it much easier. When we got to the top, there was a nice view of Mt. Fuji very nearby.

We made the descent to Lake Yamanaka where the finish is and then slowly made our way bus by bus, train by train back home. Altogether the hike took us about 7 hours which isn't bad. But it was definitely taxing on the old legs. My left knee started tightening up on this hike and the hike last weekend. I think my legs will definitely be happy when this is over.

This was our first hike to do with all 4 of us together since back in January, so it was good to get together and check on our pacing and strategy. I think we've got a good system worked out, and I have full confidence that we'll complete the hike. We've now all done every part of the course. We're taking next weekend off from practice hiking to give all our wounds a chance to heal. Then we do the real hike on April 23-25. Our starting time is 8:00am. That's 6pm CDT on April 22 for anybody back home who wants to know exactly when we're starting. I'm getting really excited about it. We've reached our fundraising goal, and now all we have to do is do it.

Here are some pictures from the hike:


This is from before obviously. These pictures (on my desk at work) are the step by step pictures of the trail that we use to make sure we don't get lost. They come from the Oxfam website on full pages but we decided to cut them out and put these booklets together to make them easier to carry around during the hike. It worked out well last night.


John and Ashley at the top of the third mountain of last night's hike. It was about 5:30 in the morning here. John, as you can see, is a self-proclaimed non-morning person.


Me at the same place. The shining area you see in the far right is Yamanaka-ko. It's one of the Fuji Five Lakes. You can also kind of see the base of Mt. Fuji in the background.


Fuji-san starting to peek out from behind the clouds with Yamanaka-ko in the foreground. This side of Mt. Fuji (the northern side in Yamanashi Prefecture) gets much more snow than the side we see all of the time.


John, Linton, and Ashley coming down the final mountain.