Last Week in Japan - Tateyama!!! (Part 3)

This is PART 3! Scroll down for the others :)

Wednesday, May 21

Tateyama, baby!

It was a beautiful train ride over

Look at that totally scenic hill!

And rice paddy lakes

I want a rice paddy field in front of my future house so I'll have a giant mirror when it rains!

We stopped at Toyama station to get off the JR and switch to a local train. And guess what we saw at the train station? A VENDING MACHINE WITH FOOD!!
Now, any American readers are probably all like, big whoop. What's the big idea?
Well, here in Japan, there are plenty of vending machines. But for just about everything except food! There's beer, cigarettes, drinks, ties, umbrellas, but NEVER food! Until now.
I was so happy, we bought the matcha chocolate cookie things I like from it. And it was awesome! An entire shelf rose up to the row the cookies were on and then the cookies were pushed down onto the shelf! Is that cool or what? That way they wouldn't get harmed by falling all the way down!

Sugoi!

On the local train, we saw the ocean!!

And I decided to eat a raspberry kit kat!

Omg it was amazing! A bit tart. But a good amount!

More ocean!

Rice paddy lakes in front of the ocean

Sea of yellow! We think this plant is some kind of wheat

Drain cover at Tateyama! Some sort of cute flower thing

Special edition winter Koala March plus the tropical one that hasn't hit America yet

I died when I saw this sign in the bathroom...

Yay! This is about to be me tomorrow! Gosh, how come Hello Kitty gets to do all this cool stuff?

A map of the way you go up the mountain with the various methods of transportation and minutes it takes for each one!

We waited at Tateyama station for the lady who ran the ryoukan we were staying at. Apparently it had been closed even though the website my mom used to book it had said it was open. But she opened it up anyway just for us! She spoke very little English, so I was the communicator on our drive up.
It showed me how far I'd come, though! I was so used to comparing myself to my friends, who are all in higher levels of Japanese than I am. But when this lady told me very basic things and my mom and sister just stared blankly at her, I realized I could actually understand her! It made me so happy! :)

So in the ryoukan, my sister and I got a separate room, so my mom got a room all to herself!

My sister and my futons!

Our tea table!

Tea and okashi!

Beautiful wall hanging with kimonos for the onsen!

Then I made tea for all of us with the matcha powder like in sadou!

These crackers were so cute with kanji on them! They tasted like fortune cookies. :)

Then we headed to the onsen. It was in a hotel nearby, but the owners drove us over!

The girls' bath!

The onsen was so nice! There were a lot of variety of baths inside that we tried (all a nice, tolerable temperature) and then an awesome one outside in the cold air overlooking the mountains.

Kirin beer vending machine!

After the nice calming onsen, we went back to our room where we ate bentos we'd gotten from a konbini earlier and then went to sleep.

The next morning it was time for MOUNTAIN CLIMBING!!!

First, we took a trolley up the mountain!

It was such a cute trolley!

Inside the trolley

We'd gotten bread at Toyama station yesterday for breakfast this morning. I got this awesome one with a kanji on it!

It was filled with cream and anko :P

The trolley stopped at a rest stop like area, where we caught a bus that went up to where the snow tunnels are.

Little model of everything I was waiting to see!

There was an overlook with a gorgeous view!

Then we got on the bus to go up to the mountain top!

The buses were so cute!

On the way we saw the tallest waterfall in Japan!!

On the bus, there were movies talking about the mountain and everything around us (with English subtitles), so it was really informative!

Snow walls I saw out the bus window!

On the way it started hailing. And it was super cloudy and foggy!

Yay!! Coming up, the Great Snow Wall!

We went outside to the observatory where there were huge snow walls!!

But then my dreams were crushed, because it turned out, since the weather was so bad, the buses weren't running through the snow walls and you couldn't even go to walk through them! Man!
So we had to take an electric cable bus through an underground tunnel instead. :(

Then, after that, we took a cable car down the mountain!

Such a pretty view!

Well, most of the time it looked like this, but it cleared up once in a while so I could snap those pics

Our cable car!

"Please mind a shake, when a car is arriving"

After that, it was time to walk along the dam.

It was so tall!

 

Ahh, so gorgeous!

Down below

I went up to the dam observatory which had a BEAUTIFUL birds' eye view of the dam, but it was like a million stairs up to it, and by the time I got up there, I'd realized I'd forgotten my camera... D:
I totally would have climbed all those stairs over again, but we had to go to catch our bus back to Toyama.

Cute bus!

At Toyama, we took a JR back to Nagoya.

We stopped at this pretty station called Shinano Oomachi to switch trains!

On the way we saw rice paddy lakes!

And soon enough, we were back at Nagoya!
I told Mom and Bridget how much I like the top of Oasis 21, so we went up to check it out. :)

 

Then we went to Osu to shop a bit and so I could show Bridget the alpaca store.

As we walked back to Sakae, we looked around for somewhere to eat. We couldn't find anything until we passed a restaurant and I looked up at the hiragana, figuring it would say udon or something we didn't want, but it said  "donburi" (fish or veggies or whatever over rice)!!! I freaked out and said we absolutely had to eat here!

Mom and Bridget loved it too. It was so, so yummy! The best dinner I'd had in a long time!

Mine had salmon and ikura. It was SO SO amazing!

Yummmmmm

Then Mom and Bridget went to their hotel and I headed back to my dorm.