Nagano Part 2

continued…

We returned to the present day with a trip to their primary school. The building that molded the mind of my lady and all her little sibs. I was surprised at the size, or the lack thereof. but apparently there are only 130 odd students there so that would explain it.

Messing around on the playground for no reason in particular. Was fun. It had no real purpose but then not much of the trip did. It was more about spending time with them than doing anything in particular.

But it was physical activity. and physical activity takes energy which needs to be replaced before long.

Good thing the city is famous for it’s soba. The restaurant we attacked was special indeed. It was attached to an old sake winery that had been converted to a museum.

 

A tribute to the beautiful art of making booze out of rice. It was not a happy job from the looks of things but it was a rather important one. They did have some location specific booze but due to my limited budget I took a rain check. I will go back soon enough so I can buy some then. Needless to say the beast within had worked up quite an appetite.  It needed to feed.

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And feed it did, on some of the finest soba on this earth. It was a revelation. Kind of like how Mizusawa udon is udon but is nothing like udon because it is so good. The soba at Kaya was nothing like soba because it was so damn good. It was made better by the fresh wasabi, which too was insanely different form the green paste that one usually consumes. It was as expensive as it was good sadly, and it went down too fast.

Next up was a stinky sulphurous pool of water that we stuck our feet in. Onsen town footbaths pay the bills (as a Polish Pommy I know would say) especially because they are free. though this one was a mixed blessing because our feet were in hot spring wonderland while the rest of our bodies froze.

The last stop for the Chikuma tour was a park on the side of a mountain. It was cold. It was windy but it had a GIANT TENGU and a really really really long slide. It had rabbits too but they were not for eating.

In the end for if you look at how the day was spent, it was not particularly spectacular. But the company and the beauty of Nagano definitely took it up to a whole new level of epic. I will go back when the snow is gone and give those mountain roads a nice ol’ spanking.

till then…