A visit from an old flattie

The other person to visit me was Sarah, who’s now up in Hirosaki on exchange. Sarah arrived about 5 days before Spring Vacation started. She came to school for a day on a Friday, and joined me in two classes. The kids were so excited that I’m pretty sure a couple of them at least wet themselves. It had been a big week for some of them. I forced a few to talk to my sister on the phone, and then meeting another living, breathing foreigner. Oh the excitement! Then it was time to introduce Sarah to the friends, and what better way to do so that all you can drink at an izakaya (Japanese bar) for a few hours, then all you can drink karaoke for a few more? That’s right, nothing’s better. Well, almost nothing anyways. I finished school on the Monday, then we did a few things around town, including visiting Oya, a nearby town which has the oldest remains of civilisation or something in Japan. It was pretty cool, even though I don’t remember what it was famous for. There were many Buddhist statues carved into cave walls, and an 11,000 year old skeleton, and frogs! So many frogs! Sarah and I stopped counting after 7,216,318, and decided that we were nearly half way there. Big ones, small ones, yellow ones, green, orange, they were everywhere.

We also drove up to Nikko, hoping to see the lake the way I had back in autumn, but the chair lift was out of order, it was snowing, and we didn’t feel like hiking up to the top. So we went to see Kegon falls and the shrines before heading home. The next weekend, we went to Tokyo. We met Sarah’s friend Juri, who took us around Harajuku, Shinjuku, and Shibuya, then met Jen, a Canadian from Utsunomiya, with friends of hers from all over at a very upmarket nineteenth century styled bar called Elephant. After a few hours at the bar, we headed to “Womb” a club, were we would meet up with Liz and her friends. The club wasn’t bad I guess… It wasn’t amazing either though. It had a 4000 yen entry fee, there were at least 3.5 million people packed into it, and 175ml bottles of water started out at 500 yen a piece, so I’m pretty sure that it’s the kind of club I only needed to visit once. We were supposed to go and do hanami (cherry blossom viewing) on the Sunday, but the weather wasn’t the best, so we just came back to Utsunomiya.