Study Tour First Day

On the first day of the tour, we saw several attractions. The first place that we went was Oyasuba Historical Park. This is a recently discovered tomb and a museum.

We were permitted to touch the pot in the photo above.

Below you can see a bracelet. The museum curator told us that this was the most precious item in the whole mound, and that it had been found in the coffin at the top of the mound.

After seeing the bracelet I noticed that there were visual references to it everywhere in the museum. In the photo above you can see that a photo to the left of me has the bracelet in it.

There was a projector set up so that you could pretend to hold the bracelet. What impressed me the most about it though was that the whole museum building was constructed in the shape of the bracelet. In a satellite photo you can see this especially well. link: here .

For lunch we got to go to a neat buffet restaurant. Fun Fact: レストラン means "Restaurant" in Japanese, and it is said レ(re) ス(su) ト(to) ラ(ra) ン(n).

Next we went to Abukuma Cave . This was a big limestone cave that had festive lights in some parts of the cave. Something that surprised me coming here was that you were allowed to touch everything.

The tour also featured racks of wine that were grown with Fukushima grapes and were being aged in the cave.

Finally we did some stencil assisted drawings (ラーソン is a way to write my family name using Katakana, one of the Japanese forms of writing) before we arrived at a small inn to spend the night.

We slept on futons at the end of the day.

Fukushima Study Tour Overview

For the past three days I was a part of the Fukushima study tour. My university is in the Fukushima Prefecture and so I was eligible to apply for the trip. From Saturday morning until Monday night we traveled around Fukushima stopping at different locations, eating local food, and staying in inns at night.

Because we visited so many places, and there were so many things to see, I'll make posts to this blog in the next few days highlighting some of the things that we did.

One place that we stopped was an aquarium on the east coast of Japan that was damaged severely in the 2011 disaster.

We also saw a strawberry farm and a limestone cave with Christmas decorations.

One of the mornings, we woke up to see snow on the ground. This year has had very little snow so far, and so we were all excited to see it. Some of the students from Sri Lanka still haven't gotten to see a proper snowfall yet.

The trip was a lot of fun. I went on it with 5 other students from The University of Aizu, and so we got to do a lot of things together, as well as get to meet other Fukushima students. In the photo below are three other students from my university.

Christmas Break Skiing

This Christmas vacation I got to do a lot. I took a little extra time off of school to come back to the United States to see my family and relatives, and to have some extra time in Tokyo before coming back to the US.

One of the things I did with my family during my time back was skiing at a Ski resort. We saw a lot of different weather during our time there. The first few days it was cold, foggy, and snowing on the mountain. The photos above show how it was hard to see where you were going. The next day it started raining.

Eventually it became very pretty and warm. By the end of our skiing, the only snow left around was on one or two ski runs.

We had a lot of fun and I am looking forward to skiing when I return to Japan in a few days.

A collection of photographs of sunsets.

Snow, Apple Picking, and Sunset at The Castle.

The school and most of the city is in a valley. The snow here has melted since the first snow, but away from the city there still some visible. Last weekend I went apple picking and although it was wet and rainy at the school, there was snow on the ground at the orchard.

More and more of the mountains surrounding the city have snow on them. Below are photos from different perspectives. In the first photo below, the mountain on the right has a tiny hat of clouds.

Mt. Bandai a big mountain in Fukushima. I think that it is the mountain to the right in the photos above. Below is a print depicting its 1888 eruption. I hope it doesn't erupt again!

Yesterday I was near Tsuruga castle at 4:30, when the sun sets. Below, you can see the sunlight reflecting off of the new snow on the mountains, as well as some other sights from the castle in the evening.