Day 8

Not-so-good evening!

OKAY first of all, I just almost peed my pants. And I am not kidding! When we were eating dinner a few hours ago, there was this HUGE spider. I went to get the owner and she went to grab an anti-insects spray, but when we returned to the room, the spider was gone, so we were terrified because we did not know where it had gone and we did not know when it would appear again. AND GUESS WHAT, I was typing "Good evening" AND THERE IT WAS. It was suddenly walking 30 CM (!!!) away from me!! I jumped up and ran to the opposite side of the room while cursing and yelling. My dad got up, cursed with me, BUT INSTEAD OF KILLING THE BEAST he wanted to take a picture! Of course he did not manage to, so he got the spray and sprayed BUT IT WOULDN'T DIE! It walked into the direction of our suitcases and of course, it went INTO my dad's suitcase.... He gave up on the spray and grabbed his shoe and had to hit the damn thing 5 times before it was finally dead. AND now, I'm in the stage where I get startled by every single thing that moves. I have the feeling that I am not going to sleep very well tonight....

But anyway, I wanted to start my blog by saying that we ended up in the middle of nowhere today. This morning we traveled from Takayama to Shirakawago, which is a very old village in the middle of the Japanese Alps. It is also an item of UNESCO's World Heritage list and I thought it was pretty cool. The sad part is, is that it is very small and everything looks alike, so after 2 hours of walking around, we were already kind of done with the place. Also it was very hard to find a super market and it was even harder to find a place with wifi. We ended up going to the museum, the viewpoint and the supermarket and soon it was time to check in in our Minshuku (kind of hotel, but everything is in traditional Japanese style) and we relaxed a little in our room and in the bath tub. I am already kind of used to washing myself outside the tub and having to take off my shoes all the time and it is starting to make a lot more sense. 

Besides this, nothing really happened today. Just that we came across a loootttt of insects. And it is really interesting to see that every insect in Japan is at least 3 times as big as insects in The Netherlands. For example the ants and the dragonflies are huge and, as you've just read, so are the spiders. And actually it is not interesting at all, it's just really freaking me out, because I was already scared of insects in The Netherlands, but seeing them 3 times as big is even more frighting. 

Also there's another thing why I don't really like this place, besides it being small and monotonous and full of big instects, is the fact that I have literally no idea what my dinner consisted out of. The owner of the Minshuku had made our dinner and there were 10 bowls and plates for each of us. On one plate was a complete fish, which I had to dissect with chopsicks, another plate had 2 pieces of orange, one was a bowl of rice, in one pan was some meat mixed with some vegetables. Then we also had a plate with some sort of potatosalad, one bowl of weird looking vegetables, another plate with weird vegetables, a bowl with some sort of weird soup and a bowl with I think was tofu or something and the last place had some fried vegetables which I also did not recognize. I ended up tasting almost everything, but 6 out of the 10 dishes were not quite my taste. I ended up eating 3 bowls of rice instead of all the weird vegetables. 

The funny thing is, is that we are getting breakfast tomorrow from the lady as well, and as a back-up plan, my dad and I bought a bag of bread and some strawberry jelly, just in case. 

So a short summary of today: Shirakawago is very scary and weird :)

THE END ( just kidding, I'll talk you to again tomorrow BYE)