Mt. Hakkoda and Nebuta no Sato

Hi everyone!

It's time for another FB reporting event! In addition to experiencing new things, these events are also very good because they force me to keep writing on my blog even when I'm busy...

This time, I went on a two-part tour. First, we went to Mt. Hakkoda to the south, took the ropeway all the way up to the top, and toured the "gold line trail". It was my first time seeing snow this season (even if just snow on the ground). This was perhaps the prelude to the random, crazy winter storm we got a couple weeks ago...

Please excuse the slantiness of the right side...I was a bit rushed when I was taking the 3rd part of the panorama hahaha Anyways, you could see Hirosaki City to the left, Aomori City (near the bay), and Mutsu (not pictured) to the far right!

The view was absolutely amazing. What a beautiful day for a hike!

The Hakkoda mountain range, which has the kanji for 8 in it's name (八甲田 <--the 1st character), is actually made up of more than 8 mountains.

It wasn't snowing in the city yet, but the leaves on Hakkoda were starting to turn white...

Our friendly tour guide, who is telling us about Hakkoda's famous "snow monsters". Snow monsters are actually trees that get covered in snow and become statuesque piles of snow! This only happens in a few places in the world where trees can get blasted by fierce snowy gales.

Our tour ended and we went back down the mountain. About half-way down, Ryan pointed out the ski-lift that we rode when we went snowboarding/skiing last winter vacation. I had almost forgotten that I'd already been there! Hakkoda looks completely different in every season...

 

Winter.

 For lunch, we went to a place called Willer Moya, which is right next to Moya Hill's "Hills Thunder" (the downhill go-kart track). We were served a san-kai soba tower (三階, meaning "three floors/stories") and we had to mix the dipping sauce ourselves.

三階そば (aka: "too many noodles")

From left to right: grated ginger and green onions, grated nagaimo (a potato that becomes really sticky when grated...apparently, it's also called a "Chinese yam"), and quail egg over grated daikon (radish)

The soba was pretty standard, but the dipping sauce was a bit strange; it consisted of the regular noodle dipping sauce (called tsuyu), but you could also mix in the stuff in the picture above! The sauce ended up being a bit sticky because of the nagaimo (Ryan wasn't a bit fan of that texture/taste combination), but it tasted ok to me! It's been a while since I'd had a Japanese food that I hadn't tried before.

The Hills Thunder track has officially closed (I believe) and is being prepped for the skiing season!

Last, we went to our final (and main) destination, Nebuta no Sato (ねぶたの里, literally the Village of Nebuta). There, we got to see, experience, and learn about all sorts of things Nebuta-related.

First, we were shown drawings and sketches of Nebuta before they're made. In addition, they had an entire wall dedicated to pictures of real-life Nebuta floats! I don't know how old some of these pictures were, but they even had a lot of black-and-white pictures.

Whenever I see beautiful paintings and sketches, I think of my Tia. :)

All of the sketches were very detailed.

The wall of Nebuta floats

Black-and-white pictures! This festival's been around a pretty long time!

Next, we were shown some Nebuta floats up-close and personal!

After that, we got to paste paper onto the wiring of a new Nebuta float! We had to take a special paper, place it on a square that we wanted to paste it on, and trace an outline of it with our finger and make an imprint on the paper. Then, we had to cut out the outline (plus a millimeter's worth of space around the edge). The most fun part was putting glue on the wires and pasting our work of art onto the new Nebuta. It'd be so much fun if we could make a float for next years parade! :)

Ryan pasting his paper on the sword section of the Nebuta while standing in front of the Pikachu Nebuta

 

Not only did we get to paste the paper onto the wirings of a float, we actually got to try our hand at moving the whole thing!! A finished Nebuta float is HUGE, so it requires about 20 strong men (in our case, 30 normal/weak people) to carry it. I don't have a video of us carrying it*, but it was a lot of fun!! :)

Just when we thought we were done after watching some traditional nebuta instrument performances and jumping with the Nebuta no Sato staff, we then got to play all of the instruments! The flute was incredibly difficult to play (only a few people could make sounds come out of it at all), but we ended up being pretty good at beating the small taiko drums and playing the cymbals. We even got to beat the HUGE taiko drum outside!

Note the small drums to the left of the huge drum. Those little ones are the ones that we first played...

All in all, it was cold, but I had an awesome time there. If my family and friends ever came to Aomori and they didn't get a chance to experience the Nebuta festival first-hand, I would definitely bring them here. Even though the staff didn't speak much English, they were incredibly friendly people who did their best to ensure we had a great time. I don't think beating the huge drum was originally on the schedule, but after Ryan earnestly asked if he could beat it later, the guide pulled some strings and we got to hit as our final hurrah of the night. What a great ending to a fun day~!

That's all for today! Until next time~!

Bonus pictures:

*Sidenote: The verb for motion/movement is called "unkou (運行)" and has the kanji for "carry" and "going" in it. So, the moving of this huge nebuta is "unkou suru (運行する)" in Japanese. It's a bit immature to say this, but I can't help but giggle whenever I hear that word. It sounds eerily similar to the Japanese word for "poop", which is "unko" (with a short "o" vowel sound at the end, compared to unkou's long "o" vowel sound)... tee hee