August 9th: And on the 6th day, Colin tried SUSHI!

The real stuff. Not that fake Nebraska wannabe sushi. But more on that later.

After breakfast this morning, we watched the rest of the olympics while Kuroda-san's wife was away. It was pretty cool! I think this family really enjoys sports, so we might be watching a lot of olympics. Once everyone was back, we drove up to the mountains through Nishihara-mura and Aso (both are towns... mura = village, Aso is a city). Oh, also I got up close and personal with the windfarm I've always seen to the east of town waaay off on the horizen. Oh man, the sound those massive fans make when you're directly under them is scary. You've got these massive blades spinning disgustingly faster than anything that size should be moving, and you can literally hear them SLICING THROUGH THE AIR!! When I got out of the car, I looked up just in time to see one spinning right down towards me. I kinda flinched. C'mon! Can you IMAGINE one of them slying off and spiking through the car into the ground??? *shudder*

Annyway, we went to find the friendship forest. It was kinda cool. He told me that in 1996, Hastings College students came to Ozu and planted a little grove of trees up in a little non-descript part of the mountain. He was going to show me the little commemorative post placed there, but the weeds were overgrown to be about chest high. We hacked through some to see if we could find it, but to no avail. In the winter, though, all the weeds die off, so the post is in the middle of the field. Still fun, either way. I felt like a marine, or something, climbing through the tall brush on some Japanese island... maybe that's a bad comparison... haha

we drove around the mountain a bit and he showed me some of the spectacular views of Ozu, Kumamoto city, Nishihara, and Aso. He also pointed out the different mountain peaks. (Including "neko dake"... you guess it. Cat Mountain!) The whole area (maybe not Ozu and Kumamoto... my geography is shady) is one massive crater from a volcano blast, but the only real volcano (nakadake, I think) left was just over the horizon. Since it was late, he said he would take me to Aso Nakadake tomorrow morning, so off we'll go. We had more important matters to attend to...

...like SUSHI FOR LUNCH!! Oh man. OH. MAN. Sushi is AMAZING! The little sushi bar we went to at first seemed like a little McDonald's type place (and that comparison is NOT doing the place justice... not to self: think of new comparison) with tables and everything... but then I looked and saw that each table, while at usual American height, was raised off the floor about 2 feet. So, yes. Standard routine. Take off shoes, and sit on knees or cross-legged at the table. Crap, here goes my legs again. :(

The place was pretty cool. It had a constantly moving conveyer belt running by each table with pre-made sushi standards running around on it. You just grab what you want as it goes by, and the waitress counts the plates at the end (105 or 210 yen per plate, depending on the item/color of plate). I thought that was where the fun stopped, BUT WAIT!! There was a call button that Den's wife pressed and soon the server came over. They placed an order for some specialty things, and within about 3 minutes, there was suddenly a little monorail-shaped tray sliding along above the conveyer belt. It stopped at our table, a buzzer sounded, and we grabbed the food off of it. The little train shot back to the kitchen, and we devoured the food.
I have never had sushi before, so part of me was nervous. What if I hated it? I'm in freaking Japan, and I wouldn't like sushi! not the case, though. It was VERY good! The shrimp, tuna, salmon, beef, chicken... everything was awesome. The wasabi on a few items kinda caught me off guard (seriously... for a second, it felt like every pore on my face opened up and screamed... but not in a bad way... nice mental image... where was I?), but it was very good. After this, they showed me around Jusco (Kinda like Walmart) and the 100 Yen shop (oh man, so awesome) before heading back home. On the way home, they showed me where my apartment and my school are. They're very close, so that's good. Also, tons of rice fields!

Too much going on... see the next post.