Couch surfing to the coast

And when we arrived to Takayama, it was all there. Super cold, raining... But happily for us, also Amber showed up to pick us up and take us to hers and her husband Joe's home. We cooked takoyaki for dinner, a traditional Japanese meal, consisting of fried balls filled with pieces of octopus or pretty much anything that you want to put in. It was so nice to finally speak to someone without having to use our arms and legs and single syllables only...

The special takoyaki frying pan. It doesn't look like balls just yet, but wait for it...

Amber and Joe are an American couple that came to Japan 6 months ago to teach English at a private school and they plan on staying here for as much as they can. They live in a house with two floors, so much bigger than what we saw as a standard living in Tokyo, we even had our own room! In the morning Amber gave us a ride up to Hida Folk Village where we started the only day we had for Takayama. The village is a large open-air museum with old traditional houses with thatched roofs that were brought here from all over Japan. You can wander around and learn about Japanese artisan and village life, that is if you can read Japanese because English explanation is a bit scarce.

The circular rice field at Hida Folk Village (Hida No Sato)

Even despite that, we spent a lot of time walking around and we would have stayed even longer but we were too scared that it would start raining as it was supposed to according to the forecasts so we hurried down to the center of Takayama to take a look at the old merchant houses and the old quarters. But in the end only few drops fell and we were able to roam around until it got dark (which is at around 5pm already in this part of the country). We then ransacked the local supermarket and took home with us as much strange stuff as we could find. And I bought a huge box of sashimi for less than 4 euros, so happy! So far we are experimenting a lot with the food and have been quite lucky not to come across anything exceedingly disgusting.

A little bit of everything

Takayama was veeeeeery cold, just about 10 degrees max, so we were hoping to warm up a little in our next destination, Kanazawa, a coastal town about 4 hours from Tokyo. But no sun here either, I guess we will have to wait until Bangkok to put our gloves away, sigh. Kanazawa is probably the least appealing place we have seen so far. It is not bad and it is much bigger than Takayama but somehow we did not know what to do after just two or three hours. Maybe if the weather had been better, we would have tried to explore both the castle gardens and the Kenroku-en gardens better but since we were not very keen on freezing to death in our first week of travels, we called it a day very soon.
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Yukitsuri ropes that protect the black pines in Kenroku-en against the heavy snow falls this region receives in the winter

However, we are really glad we did not skip Kanazawa in our itinerary because we had a great time with our host, Laura, also from the US, who teaches English through a programme organized by the Japanese government. We talked and talked and talked... and on the second night we went out to dinner with her friend and two more couchsurfers from Israel. So yes, we are starting to be social on this trip! We will try to meet the Israeli couple again in Kyoto as they are taking pretty much the same route as we are. And we hope to meet Laura again somewhere and I have a feeling we will since she is only 25 but already lived in Spain, France, Russia, Costa Rica, and now Japan... So we can bump into her anywhere.

This was our last couch surfing here in Japan but we hope to find more couches later on along the way as it turned out to be a really cool experience. And now, Kyoto is awaiting us and we can't wait!