Ichiga Trip: Day I
Saturday: November 30, 2013
This weekend was our overnight trip in Yamanashi Prefecture, near Mount Fuji. It began with a meet-up around 9:30 before a long bus ride to our ryokan (around 2 and a half hours... maybe). There was a seating chart and everything to get international students and Japanese students to sit together and meet each other so we spent the time chatting with our partners and doing short introductions to the entire bus over the mic.
The trip was just for international students and first years in Niji no Kai so a lot of it was a making-friends type deal.
About halfway through we stopped for a restroom break and I got some takoyaki to tide over lunch and UGH IT WAS SO GOOD (for those who don't know what takoyaki is... I don't really know how to explain it other than that it involves octopus inside of a batter-type-thing).
From the bus we started to get some really nice views of Mount Fuji, and we even drove past Fujikyu/Fuji-Q Highland, an amusement park with a great view of the mountain.
Upon arriving we realized the place wasn't a hotel but more of a ryokan type thing and we had the whole thing to ourselves (all the rooms and common areas, woo!) so we hung out in the big tatami mat room for a while and heated ourselves over a stove because Yamanashi was FREEZING (which is why I bought new clothes the day before).
This was a picture of my bedroom, which I never actually got to sleep in (I'll elaborate on that later, sort of). I believe we were supposed to fit 6 girls in it.
This is the living room and couches which turned into my bed (kind of).
We then all went to the most ghetto gym I'd ever seen to play some games while we waited several hours for the next bus of people to arrive (there was a morning and afternoon bus).
We broke into teams and played a variety of games. These included tug of war (which sucked due to my hands being torn up from falling down the ramp the other day, ugh - and my team lost every time), this game where we had to do a relay where you carried various objects with chopsticks from one side of the gym to the other (our team won!), the stocking game we played at the Mario Party event, a relay game where we had to race back and forth across the gym with a timer that kept getting faster (my friend and I were the only girls to participate in that one), and then the icing on the cake:
MUGICHAAAA.
Each team had a literal bucket full of mugicha team and each member got a straw and we had to race to finish the entire bucket (we won again!) which caused many people to feel physically ill. I never realized how many people hated tea.
After the games we walked to the lake across the street from our ryokan to check out Fuji from outside of a bus.
After that we checked out the shrine right next to our ryokan as well.
Then we creeped on where we would eat dinner later inside the ryokan because it looked REALLY FANCY.
At this point we did this Japanese game where they pair one girl and one boy together and then make them walk together outside in the dark with hardly any light and there are people set on the path to scare them. The point is basically a pseudo-date with the idea that the girls will be scared into the boys' arms or something and it's sort of like a trust game, but it was immensely awkward because no one knew each other. It was basically like being paired with a complete stranger and having to have conversation with them for 20 minutes, but in the dark.
[[EDIT: FIGURED OUT WHAT IT'S CALLED. It's "kimodameshi" which just means it's a test of courage, but in this case with a romantic twist.]]
We walked through the shrine and followed this trail lit by nothing but glowsticks, but my partner and I hardly got scared because we caught up with the couple in front of us so we just watched them get scared. The people doing it were like WHY ARE YOU GOING SO FAST and we were just like IT'S SO COLD GET US INSIDE. It was still fun and it was pretty to be outside in the country and such, but it was unbelievably cold.
A lot of the groups didn't get to do the full thing because we ran out of team, but while half of us did the walk the other half ate, so once we got back I got all of this food to eat myself.
After dinner I met up with my "band" to practice our songs for that evening's party and it was actually a lot of fun just doing that for a while before we decided to take advantage of the ryokan's ofuro before the party. An ofuro is a public bath, so this was semi-private since it was in the ryokan. This is that whole awkwardly-being-naked-in-front-of-strangers thing that you may hear people talk about when discussing Japanese baths. First you shower off in this common area and then get into a shared bath. Awkwardness aside, once you're inside it's not that big of a deal and we had some nice bonding over the awkwardness of being naked for the 10 minutes we were in there.
We then all met up to start the night's party and my friends and I started the night by performing our songs. One kid played guitar while the rest of us sang "Stand By Me," "All Star," "Silver Birch," and "Jingle Bell Rock." It was super fun and was way less stressful than anticipated.
We ended up being the only real performers, the only other thing was that they had people from each group (they had separated us into little circles to get to get to know new people) come up and do charades and then asked the groups to guess who was which thing. We also did this thing called お尻文字 (oshirimoji) where people turn around and draw either a hiragana or even kanji character with their butt and you have to guess what it is. It's basically impossible because you're laughing too hard at the fact everyone just looks kind of like a stripper.
Beyond that the night was long and no amount of words could accurately describe the events of that night. We'll just say I went to bed around 5 AM and leave it at that. Most people had gone asleep and hogged all the actual bedrooms so the final wave of people just sort of crashed on the couches, floor, or didn't sleep at all. But we took full advantage of the fact we had a stove in the living room to keep us warm so everyone was basically a mass of blankets on the couch or curled up like dogs next to the fire and basically blocking all possible footpaths.
