Takayama is a small town by Japanese standards. It is compact enough to navigate most of it on foot. The street scenes here are so neat because the traditional wood lattice buildings of old Japan have been beautifully preserved. We loved walking the streets and eating all sorts of foods from vendor stalls. I particularly loved these delicious little fish-shaped cakes filled with chocolate...I ate more than I should have. A lot more than I should have.
Anyway, Takayama is home to many craftsmen and sake breweries. The streets are lined with shops containing local wares. (This was a super fun place to shop.) We kept spotting these HUGE balls of some sort of organic matter hanging in front of many storefronts. Come to find out, in Takayama drinking establishments and breweries mark themselves as such by placing a ball of cedar leaves outside their entries. I love these balls. Love them. (I told D I wanted to construct a cedar ball for our backyard. He laughed and wished me luck.) They're so cool. And they are pretty much everywhere, so we got plenty of opportunities to photograph them. (And plenty of opportunities to sample sake. Tee hee.)
Did I mention how much I love those suspended cedar balls? LOVE them. As luck would have it, we stopped to check out a gallery of woodblock prints by local artists. Woodblock printing is a highly revered art form in Japan, so we were planning on bringing one home. Guess what? We found an AMAZING woodblock print of a sake brewery, complete with a cedar ball! D and I were so excited we were giddy. It is so cool; the artist is an 83 year old man who has lived in Takayama his whole life. How cool is that?! That's what I love about buying art when we travel; we get to bring home a piece of that place.
Speaking of shopping, there is this wonderful tradition here in Japan where shops wrap up your purchases with beautiful papers before putting them in a bag. Every purchase gets gift-wrapped with fantastic Japanese papers. As the shopper, it is customary to admire the wrapping work, as it is a source of pride for the shopkeeper. Speaking of things about Japan, there is a distinct lack of public garbage cans here. There are no garbage cans on streets. I can't figure out what people do with their garbage, but there isn't a speck of litter to be found. Interesting, eh? Oh, and public bathrooms don't have soap. This one throws me. This is the absolute, hands-down cleanest culture I've ever encountered, yet no soap in public bathrooms. And no paper towels or hand dryers. It is expected that you carry a cloth in your purse or pocket with which to dry your hands. Most shops sell adorable washcloths for this purpose.
Okay, enough of that diversion, back to Takayama. After a couple hours of roaming around ducking (literally) in and out of shops and snapping photos of the seemingly hundreds of mini shrines, we caught a bus to the Hida Folk Village. This is an open-air village where several traditional Hida farmhouses were relocated to protect their historical significance. There are over 300 farmhouses here, all beautifully preserved. (Yes, we went to the "Old World Wisconsin" of Japan. We are that lame.)
So all day we had been thinking that our train left at 7:50pm. All day we planned around our departure time of 7:50. We were kind of obsessed with watching our watches all afternoon because we could not miss our train. (Takayama is relatively remote and isn't serviced by trains as regularly as many other places. If we missed our train, there wouldn't be another until tomorrow.) At 6:20 we decided to grab some dinner at a restaurant about 10 blocks from the train station. We get seated, go through the usual menu translation junk, decide on our meals and order. D then excuses himself to use the bathroom. I decide for some reason to check our train tickets. Departure time on the ticket, you ask? 6:42pm. 6:42!!!!! I looked at my watch and it read 6:31pm! Aaaaaaaah! I jump out of my seat and show our tickets to the waitress and ask her to please give us the food to go. "In box" I say to her. She smiles and nods and runs to the kitchen and yells something that sounded in tone like HURRY UP! to the cooks. By this time D is back and I show him the tickets. His jaw drops. The thing about trains in Japan is that there is no breathing room. If the departure time is 6:42, then it leaves at 6:42 on the nose. We gather up our things just as the waitress returns with our meals...ON CERAMIC PLATES! Oh no!!! Horrible timing for translation issues. D says something to her and she says something back and the word is that they have no boxes for takeout. D tells her we cannot stay, pays the bill faster than fast and we tear out of that place like bats out of hell and proceed to sprint FULL SPEED to the train station, a full10 blocks away. We get there at 6:41, hop on the train and it leaves within 45 seconds. Not kidding. That is the best 2500 yen we've ever spent for food we didn't get to eat. Seriously. About a minute into the train ride we look at each other, both still catching our breath, and start busting a gut laughing. As they say, timing is everything.
Tomorrow (Saturday) we head to Nara for our stay at the ryokan (traditional Japanese inn). I am not sure I am prepared for communal bathing, but after today's hectic dinner...or hectic lack of dinner, I guess...I am looking forward to a meal in my bathrobe. Tee hee.
A few photos from Friday: Girl sleeping on the train...Carp kites are all over Takayama; they always hang in multiples...Me and my delicious fish-shaped chocolate-filled cakes...Self-portrait at Takumi Shrine...Bell boy...Red bicycle at a shrine whose name escapes me at the moment...3 school girls riding their bicycles home...kimonos and ice cream...D and a cedar ball (amazing, eh? See what I mean about the cedar balls?)
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