Okayama Field Trip, day 1

I'm going to start off by saying that if it seems like this is an awful small number of pictures for a two-day trip... Well, it is. The reason for that is that I have about 50 up in the gallery for this trip.
On Wednesday and Thursday, all the study abroad students went on a field trip instead of classes. I'm sure a couple people skipped out, but pretty much all 120 or so of us went, I think. It was school-sponsored, and it would be entirely possible to go and not pay a dime more, but I spent about $60 during the two-day period between various random food and ice cream and drinks and omiyage.

We left the school around 8AM, stopped at some kind of rest area about halfway, and got to our first place around 11. It was the Bizen sword smithing village, which is cool, but we pretty much just wandered around in a museum, which was not so cool. Everybody else must have thought it was pretty boring, too, as the three little smithing video games they had set up never fell into disuse for more than about thirty seconds. They had some hand-forged kitchen knives for sale, but I fortunately only had about $90 on me and they were averaging about $120. As cool as swords are, I'm not really a museum person. They always feel kind of snobby, I think. Or at least it's similar to snobby.

Next, we got back on the bus for... a... while? Anyway, we had lunch a bit later, and I ate most of it, but couldn't convince myself to eat the little sardine fish thing.

Ew.

On the bright side, after lunch, we looked at another random tourist-trappish shop, then went and played in a park. I'm not sure if that was planned or not, but I think it was one of the highlights of the trip. There are some good shots from the park in the gallery.

This is a picture of the girl I sat with on the way back. I can neither spell nor pronounce her name, but it's Russian, and is apparently very common.

Next up is the oldest public school in the world. Or at least, so they claim. I thought it was a nice area, as it was the first time I've seen grass in decent quantity since comng to Japan. There were a couple of other schools touring around here, too, and I accidentally got a pantyshot on some random girl when I took a picture of their class. There was some interesting stuff here, but I would have to recommend the Korakuen garden over this place if you're choosing between the two. The school's name was something like shizutani, which I would venture to guess means "quiet valley". By the way, gallery.

Later, we went to an all-you-can-eat strawberry farm, where you basically get an hour to pick and eat as many as you can. This by itself was pretty cool, but I had a bandanna in my pocket and ended up bringing about four pounds of strawberries with me. That bandanna now looks like I tried to kill someone with it and smells like I put about four pounds of strawberries in it. Strangely enough.
I later found out that they were stopping people when they tried to bring out even a handful of strawberries, so I guess it's just by chance that I managed to walk off with my big bag o' fruity business. Even though we didn't have a fridge, we managed to eat them all before they went bad. Some were so plump and juicy that I popped them just by pulling them off the vine. You can see the fruits of our labor in the picture at right, but somebody else got a picture of my sack, and I want to get that from them for my own uses. You really should check out the gallery, by the way.

After this, we finally went to the ryokan (Japanese-style inn), where many people immediately went into the onsen, but my group of guys just kind of sat around and talked. It was cool anyway, as the onsen was probably overcrowded with everybody in it and I was pretty wary of the whole idea, anyway. It's been a long time since I got naked in front of random people, and I wasn't intending to stay naked previously, which psychologically makes a big difference, maybe.

Dinner was traditional Japanese cuisine, which means I couldn't recognize any of it and most of it was completely inedible. Raw beef was surprising, but it was the most delicious thing there. After all the scary foods, they finally brought out some rice just before the end, for which I was oh-so-thankful. Even if the rice blew, it was still nice to eat something I could identify. I mean, I'm all for trying new foods, but this trip used up all of my food bravery for about two months. Did I mention lunch was also traditional Japanese cuisine?

Oh, and breakfast the next day.

Traditional Japanese food might be okay if you are against cooked meat, really like fish and random seafood, think that everything is better with fish eggs sprinkled on top, or have just always wanted to eat vast quantities of raw egg, or don't have taste buds. I qualify none of these conditions, and will happily go on eating plain white rice every day. Oh, and the Japanese food that's imported from China, like ramen. Yum.

As an added bonus, us silly Americans were just about the only people wearing our street clothes at dinner. At breakfast, we were just about the only ones wearing yukata. There's just no winning, I think.

[eloquent segue]

Well, that was day one of our two-day trip! It was my intention to do the whole trip in one post, but this is already well past a printed page (though it's less than I thought), so I'll end here for now.
Oh, and check out the gallery.