Animals of Japan (and many many other places)

I spent a lot of time in Japan visiting zoos and aquariums, which was pretty neat. The Morioka Zoo was nice, but the Ueno Zoo in Tokyo and the aquarium in the Tokyo Skytree were awesome.

The aquarium was super neat because it was designed using principles of Japanese art, so it was kind of like an art exhibit that happened to be made of fish and jellyfish and penguins. Different sections featured different principles of design, and explained the significance for each. There was an awesome corridor of jellyfish, and a really cool dark hallway that had lighted tanks of different varieties of goldfish.

The Ueno Zoo was cool because it was built into Ueno Park, which was right outside our hotel. The pens in the zoo were very natural and big and open-air. Sometimes I wondered if there was enough keeping the animals in! It also had awesome buildings of nocturnal animals that were very very dimly lit so the nocturnal animals would be active. There were bats and aye-ayes and my favorite, a tiny mouse deer, the smallest hoofed animal of all!

Anyway, I’ve compiled a short video of my favorite animal encounters in Japan zoos and aquariums. Hopefully I’ll see some more wild wildlife once I’m there to stay!

Shrimpy Miso

So THIS is why that miso was so good.... 

Japanese food rocks.

Hello Kitty Popcorn

Tyler and I were wandering one of Morioka’s malls the other day when we made a brilliant discovery outside Toys R Us. It was pink. It was Hello Kitty. It sang and danced and…. MADE POPCORN*!!!  Seriously. A better invention there never was. Tyler was almost more excited for me than I was! He rushed to deposit 200 yen in the coin slot, and the magic began!

Voila! 80 seconds later, the popcorn emerged! Amazing! Fantastic! Phenomenal! Stupendous! Delicious! Hello Kitty Popcorn!!!


*You may notice there is a theme throughout this blog of me getting overly excited about popcorn. Just go with it.

Koiwai Farm

One sunny Saturday, Tyler and I visited Koiwai farm, a famous dairy farm on the outskirts of town. We took a 30 minute bus ride into the beautiful countryside, across rice fields and to the farm!

(It was very sunny and windy.)

I was a little confused to find that there were basically no animals in the area of the farm that was open for visitors. I guess most of the actual farm work happens nearby, but not in the visiting area. What the visiting area did have was a beautiful open field with attractions (food, gift shops, activities) around the outside edge. We started off our visit with the best soft serve ice cream I have ever tasted. It was so creamy. It was real dairy! It was like it just came out of a really cold cow that ate nothing but sugar. YUM.

Tyler and I tried our hands at some Japanese archery. We definitely need a little more practice to achieve any sort of accuracy, but it was fun. We wandered some more, checked out the gift shops, and then headed to the one big event that was advertised: something about a sheep dog and some sheep!

We went to the sheep area where there actually were pastures of sheep. Yay! Animals! I do love sheep. The show was a sheep dog herding up some sheep, then the announcer guy demonstrating sheep sheering by sheering a sheep in front of the crowd, which I thought was a little weird to watch. That poor naked and embarrassed sheep! But the weirdest part was that there was a mysterious white couple sitting on the grass in front of Tyler and I who entered with an entourage and were being video taped while they sat and watched the sheep. Very strange.

Anyway, we walked around in the sun, and ate delicious food, and got this really great picture taken as an ice cream cone and a milk jar. All in all, a day well spent!

Long Time No Blog :/

Hello, oh blog readers! I’m sorry it’s been so long since my last post. All of a sudden I went from vacation mode to work mode and then to travel mode, and I fell behind! The good part of that, though, is that I have LOTS of upcoming posts about the past two weeks. There will be fun photos and adventures and stories galore! Yay!

The first crucial piece of information you should know is that I’m back in the states! Surprise! What’s that you say, you thought I would be in Japan for a year? True. But due to a very complicated chain of events involving travel plans and visas and job-hunting, I went on a mini-vacation to Japan, I’m going home for a couple weeks, then back for the full year. It’s a lot of traveling (which I’m still in the middle of), which sucks, but it also means I get to see all my favorite people! So that’s great.

Stay posted for many blog posts coming soon to catch you up on all I've been up to in Japan. There might even be something about my adventures in Alaska!

See you soon!

Amusement Park

High on a hilltop near Morioka, Japan, hides a magical land called:

Ok, so I don't actually know what it is called since it's in Japanese. But there was a wonky panda and a long-armed clown to welcome us, so you know it has to be great! Here's an aerial view of the amusement park we visited this weekend with Claire and Jesse, taken from the ferris wheel of course!

(Photo cred goes to Jesse on most of these pictures)

There were so many awesome things about the little Japanese amusement park next to the zoo. Including:

I was tall enough for every ride!

I finally got to drive a pink car in Japan!

There were beautiful mountains and lush forest all around us!

A carousel!

And lots lots more, including a fence-maze-thing, a very haunting haunted house that I thought we were maybe going to be lost forever in, a 3D theatre room where we almost got eaten by a dinosaur, and lots of rides that spun us around in circles and upside down and all kinds of directions. But the best ride of the day by FAR was this roller coaster. It wasn't a particularly long ride, but each individual car spun around as you whizzed through the jungle. It made us feel like this:

 

Who wouldn't love being in a place like this?

Tourist-y Day

On Saturday, Tyler and I did some more tourist-ing. First, we went to the Morioka History and Culture Museum. It was not as big as the Iwate Prefectural Museum as it focused just on the history and culture of Morioka (as could be surmised from the name). It was really cool, but unfortunately there wasn't a good English guide available and very little writing was in English. The exhibits were awesome and had a lot of videos and reconstructions... I just wish I had known more about what I was looking at! At the entrance they had floats on display from one of the big festivals that happens in the fall. They had robes you could wear to pose with the floats, so of course I did!

The museum took less time than I had anticipated, so we decided to venture to this magical place I had read about online called Iwachu Casting Works. Morioka is known for its amazingly gorgeous cast iron teapots, which of course I am obsessed with. I really want to learn the art of cast iron teapot making! So for my first step toward this goal, we went to the Iwachu Casting Works "theme-park style factory." On the website there were directions for how to take a bus to Iwachu. We got off at the appointed stop, then used Tyler's Japanese iPhone for directions to the factory. It took us down a tiny alley and up to the back of what looked like an abandoned factory building with a sign on top that read Iwachu Casting Works. Because everything in that area was packed so tightly together, there was no way to get from the back of the building to the front (there were houses and fences right up to the sides of it). Tyler was pretty convinced that the factory was out of business, but I wasn't ready to give up on my dream. We backtracked to the main road and followed a different path, which led us to the front door of:

Needless to say, we were quite happy to have found the place! When we went inside the first room was a museum area, and there was no one there. So Tyler still joked that it was abandoned. But we wandered through the museum area and caught sight of people! Next we came to the factory part, which was very small. There was only one guy in there at the time, working on polishing some tea pots that had just been cast and didn't have their handles attached yet. I was amazed by the volume of production in that tiny factory!

The last part of the building was the show room and store. There were some amazingly gorgeous pieces. The cast iron feels so incredible in your hands, and you can tell how nice it would be filled with warm tea. The Iwachu teapots are not cheap though. I'm going to have to save up and buy one as my big Japan souvenir. Or learn how to make them myself! (A girl can dream). 

Me with what is apparently the largest cast iron teapot in the world. Cool!

A website of potential interest:
http://www.japan-iwate.info/app/location_detail.php?lid=80  This is the official Iwate tourism page, and everything on it is awesome. The link will take you straight to the section on the Iwachu Casting Works factory, but feel free to explore from there!