Japan day 14 - Ichinomiya and Takayama
Today was my one and only full day in Takayama with Matthew, so we made the most of it, even though I slept in a bit!
After a somewhat lazy start of breakfast at home and getting ready (I totally didn't take any outfit pics of my Takayama days, oops), Matthew had found that we could go and craft our own sarubobo at the Takayama Craft Experience Center! What a wonderful idea! So we drove back into the city, appreciating the chill rainy/foggy day after the weather last night. It was really so beautiful seeing the clouds around the mountains (the pictures below are on the brief walk from Matthew's to the bus, in Ichinomiya). We took a bus in today because we had planned to drink later!
At the crafting place, they gave us the instructions in Japanese and I interpreted based on gestures and what Matthew translated to me. The dolls themselves were already made, and we got to choose which colour of doll, the colour of the little emblem around their neck, and the pattern of their little outfit. Then we could choose what to write on the emblem (I really don't know what it's called). The center had some example kanji on sheets for reference, including some things like "love," "prosperity," "success," as well as kanji for different countries. I decided to try my hand at the kanji for "friend," given the reason I was in Takayama, and because it was a relatively simple kanji. There were a bunch of pens and markers to choose from to design it how we wanted! I had picked a red sarubobo because it felt the most classic, and hemmed and hawed for a while at the other colour choices, but I like what I went with in the end :) As it turns out I guess I forgot to get a close up of my finished sarubobo, but they wrapped it up so nicely to protect it, so I'll have to wait until I'm home. But, one of the staff at the center took a cute picture of Matthew and I with our finished sarubobo!
It was a really fun experience and I'm so glad I have a customized one as a souvenir instead of one of the generic ones from the shops in old town, or elsewhere around Takayama. I will always think of this experience when I look at my little guy in the future!
For lunch, we headed to a Thai place Matthew had been to before, usually a safe bet for vegetarian food. Indeed, I got a massive plate of pad thai, which I haven't had in a few months! I should really get back into making it, I used to cook it pretty frequently around 2019-2020, including when I lived with my sister and my brother-in-law. I don't think I've made it since then though, so I'm happy to get it at restaurants!
After lunch we continued to bop around old town a bit. We had passed a stationary store the day before but not gone in (it was closed) and I absolutely cannot resist any stationary store, so we popped in and I ended up getting a few pens (including a Hangyodon pen, he's a Sanrio character that I've really come to love while playing the Hello Kitty Island Adventure game on switch. He's a very cute dragon and in that game his whole schtick is that he makes really bad puns, so of course I love him.
We also went to a shop(?) in the area that was set up as a little play shooting range - for ~$10 you could get 15 shots from a cork rifle and attempt to get prizes. Super gimmicky, but we were there to do what Takayama had to offer!! The prizes were, as far as I could tell, all different kinds of candies. Both of us managed to get a few! It ended up being actually really fun! I got orange gumballs and some Sumikko Gurashi candies I haven't tried yet.
Matthew wanted to take me to the sweets shop his friend runs, to try dorayaki, popular in the area (but not just in Gifu, it's made elsewhere too). It's a treat made of two pancakes with red bean paste inside, sometimes with other ingredients mixed in. Matthew's friend was so so lovely! We talked in a combination of Japanese with me understanding only a few words, Matthew translating when needed, and her speaking some English as well. We shared four dorayaki - regular (just red bean paste), ginger, cream cheese and nuts, and plum (I love anything plum). She also had this absolutely gorgeous yokan, a wagashi made also from red bean paste into a jelly-like texture (but that doesn't suffice to describe it), and she had made hers in two layers with chocolate as well. We got some matcha to accompany the sweets, and sat down in her shop to eat them, chatting some more. Everything was super delicious! At one point, another group of three came in, a Japanese man, one person from Mexico, and one person from Finland. The Japanese fellow spoke Spanish, and the Mexican fellow spoke Japanese, and they also sat down and we were talking in a combination of Japanese, English, with some Spanish thrown in for good measure. It was a really delightful and spontaneous multilingual experience, once again making me really appreciate getting to come on this trip and meet people from around the world and share delightful and unexpected conversation. The shop owner took a photo of all of us to put on her instagram story, it was very sweet!
Matthew mentioned that our next stop was sake tasting, and the shop owner was trying to explain some differences between some kinds of sake. She had a bottle in the back that she wanted us to try, so actually ended up giving us some on the house! I don't think she even sells it at the shop, but she was insistent, so we got started early. It was really nice of her! And it was tasty sake too. I don't know anything about sake, but it's easy enough to know what I like and don't like. So kind!
We navigated to the sake tasting place that Matthew had been recommended by a friend. He explained that the way it worked was you got tokens, and then exchanged the tokens for whatever kind of sake you wanted to try from the multitude they had there. Heck yeah, I'm in. Drinking a bunch of sake at ~2pm? Why not! Once we got there, we exchanged money for tokens, and our first task was to spin a gachapon (capsule machine) for a sake cup. There were I think 6 different designs you could get? This was then what you used for the tasting! It worked out to ~$1 per sake sample, with some of them costing a bit more. There had to have been at least 25 different ones to choose from, possibly more. They had an info card with some features of the sake listed on them, and the dispensers had tasting notes, but some of them we ended up getting just for the labels or the colour of the bottles. You inserted a token into whichever dispenser you wanted, put your sake cup under the spout, and pressed a button to give out the exact right amount. I've never seen anything like it!
It was a little bit cramped since it was a popular place and the actual space with all the dispensers was a bit small, but that was part of the charm. We ended up interacting with a woman there from China who we helped figure out how to get the cup and use the dispensers, and crossed paths with her a few times, asking her which ones she liked and recommending ones we had tried, and asking a bit about where she was from and why she was in the area. Again, another really sweet and brief interaction with a stranger!
Some of the sake we tried was (in my opinion) kind of bad (just strong and a bit sour but not in a good way), and some of it was fucking delicious (they had a yuzu one, and a mikan (kind of like clementine) one, and some of the regular ones were quite smooth). It was all part of the experience having the bad ones, though. We sometimes chose the same and sometimes different, but always tried each other's. I think we probably ended up having about 8-10 different kinds each? Little cups full, of course, but having that many in quick succession was kind of taking its toll and we were getting pretty silly. Towards the end, Matthew and I were finishing with the tastiest one (mikan) that you had to get dispensed from the counter not a machine. He asked after an employee his friend knew there, Shuhei (sp?) who he ended up chatting with, and asking what his favourite sake was. Shuhei said he liked cloudy sake (which in writing this I learned is called doboruku), which he gave us a sample of on the house. He explained that some sake is processed through a very fine mesh and they keep only the pure, clear alcohol, with doboruku, it is not pressed at all and the solids remain, resulting in the cloudy sake. I think he was explaining that it was a way to still use the waste product. The sample he gave us was not only cloudy, it was thick, way more than I was expecting! And a bit gritty! I can't even really liken the texture to anything. Maybe like thick hot chocolate? But it was cold. It was really interesting, I probably wouldn't have tried it unless he had offered it to us. Thank you Shuhei for the new experience!!
Running on our sake high, we headed towards the train station back to Ichinomiya. I insisted on stopping for a quick mitarashi dango on the way back since Matthew had pointed out some stalls the day before - a dango (sticky rice flour snack) cooked with a sweet soy sauce glaze. I have not really experienced street food here since it can be hard to tell sometimes what is meat and what is not. Bless having fluent friends! We went to a little stall that I couldn't even find on google maps later (so I'm glad I asked Matthew what the sign said) called Suzuran, run by an old lady. It was so tasty! Savoury, but rich? And still a little bit sweet? Very chewy, a great texture, with a smokey taste from being grilled on an open flame. I am glad I got to try it.
Snacked up, we went back home. I had laundry that needed doing, and we had to make dinner after all that alcohol! I did laundry just at Matthew's but we dried it at a laundromat and took a little drive around while we waited for it to finish. He pointed out the different schools he works at (he's an ALT, assistant language teacher, at 3 different schools). We continued just driving around, going up a mountain road for a bit, killing time. It was a peaceful drive, since Ichinomiya is fairly small and by this point in the evening there wasn't really anyone else on the road. Soon enough it was time to go retrieve the laundry and head home.
The dinner menu was kimchi jjigae (which I co-opted into soondubu (soft tofu) jjigae). Matthew didn't ask me to cook but he suggested this dish and I have cooked it so many times that I can do it on autopilot, and I love to cook for other people. Not only that, but it's the first home cooked meal I had had in 2 weeks! It gets really tiring just eating at restaurants. The first place I stayed in Tokyo had a kitchen so I could have cooked there, but at the beginning I was so excited to try restaurants. I've definitely been getting restaurant fatigue so I was very grateful for and excited to cook again. We put the rice on first and while it was going cracked into our fun drinks from Donki, and played a few rounds of Dutch Blitz (a fast paced card game) while listening to my upbeat kpop playlist. It's really great that both me and Matthew love kpop, because it made the soundtrack for my time in Takayama/Ichinomiya very easy. Dutch Blitz is definitely better with 3-4 people instead of 2 but it picked up after the first few rounds! Especially a couple drinks in!
Once the rice was done I threw together the soondubu jjigae in no time (it's a very quick and easy dish. I highly recommend putting this into your meal rotation). It's warm and slightly spicy, perfect for a rainy day. it ended up more sweet than I usually make it (just due to the red pepper paste that Matthew had), but still delicious and cozy. We ate a little cake Matthew had in his fridge for dessert, kind of waffle texture, and not too sweet. We continued working our way through the drinks we had gotten at Donki (all alcoholic sodas around 3%). We got mikan and yuzu, peach, apple (but not really cider), and strawberry cream soda flavour, and Matthew had already a Brazilian drink that was some fruit I had never heard of called guarana, and then a triple berry drink. They were varying degrees of good. The apple one was weird, the strawberry one was hella sweet, but the other ones were delicious. We also tried some of the candies from the shooting range the day before.
Our plans for the rest of the evening were simple - watch some Korean content. We decided on the show "I Live Alone," which follows various celebrities through a day (or more) in their daily life. We watched the episode with Jihyo, one of the members of Twice, since we both love her. It ended up being a weirdly edited supercut of a couple episodes, which was fine, but the clips were put together in not always the proper chronological order which made it a bit confusing. Matthew had seen the episodes before, though, and was able to explain any continuity issues to me. Finally, we rounded out the night by watching kpop meme compilations. Absolutely classic activity, which I am always happy to engage in with my similarly-minded friends. The benefit to these was that they had a good mix of groups - Matthew and I have some overlap in the groups we like, but the venn diagram is not a circle, so there was a bit of everything for both of us.
It was a perfect way to conclude the evening, and something that I would do to wind down even just by myself, so it was familiar and fun. As expected, my one full day in Takayama/Ichinomiya was indeed very full! Thanks to Matthew's wonderful suggestions of what to do! I had all sorts of experiences that I wouldn't have otherwise had. Of course, I slept very well once again. It's been a beautiful and wonderful time here!
