Golden Week (Part 1)

Hey everyone!

About a month ago, I traveled up to Aomori and Hokkaido during Golden Week. Golden Week, typically shortened to GW, is one of the longest vacation periods for many Japanese jobs, making it one of the most popular times to travel. If it weren't for all sorts of traveling expenses being exorbitantly high during this period, this week would definitely be "golden", indeed...

Anyways, ALTs usually take this time to travel abroad, go back home, or explore Japan. This period also happened to be the time that Kevin had decided to come to Japan and explore before heading over to Taiwan to visit his family. Since Kevin was coming (along with Wesley, in tow), we decided to tour Aomori Prefecture and the southern part of Hokkaido.

Right after my GRE, I took an overnight bus to Aomori, where I hung out with Ryan for a few days before they arrived. We went to Gappo Park, where Ryan taught me some boxing! It was unexpectedly difficult to find a flat area to practice on, due to the traffic from a nearby hanami festival. I say "hanami", but the flowers bloomed really late this year, so it just looked like people were picnicking under the bare trees.

I take no credit for taking this picture (I have no idea where this was taken), but the "hanami" kinda looked like this! Only with lots of festival stalls! And wayyyy more people.

After finally finding a suitable area, I tried my hand at boxing. It was a lot of fun learning simple techniques from Ryan. First, he taught me jabs and crosses: barefisted, then with gloves. Barefisted, by itself, wasn't very strenuous, but with the addition of gloves, it became a full-fledged arm workout. My noodley arm "muscles" were aching for quite a few days after our workout ended...

Learning and practicing was fun, but holding the boxing pads for Ryan while he was punching was terrifying at first...one wrong move and I'd get hit in the face with the back of my hand with enough force to probably give me a black eye. 0.0;;;

Needless to say, even after learning only the super basics of one martial art, I have a new-found appreciation for martial arts/artists as a whole. It'd be really cool to learn more and exercise that way :]

Another day, we took a day trip to Yunoshima Island (an island off the coast of Asamushi Onsen) and hiked a beautiful trail full of dog-toothed violets.

After our trip, we had yakiniku served by an adorable, helpful little girl, and then went to a foot bath, where a nice lady and her son decided to try chatting with us. Because Ryan looks Japanese, he loses out on the novelty of Japanese people randomly striking up conversations with him based on a gaijin appearance. I guess, since I was there, that opened up the opportunity for the lady to start talking to us and, because of this, he seemed really happy. :] I wasn't able to talk too much, but she was super nice, and even offered us apples to take home.

Not much else happened before Kevin and Wesley came, although Ryan did end up getting his Japanese driver's license! *insert fanfare here* :D Foreigners tend to fail this test multiple times, so I'm really proud that he passed in only 2 tries. :]

That's all for today~! Next post will be about our group trip to Hokkaido!