Takayama!

So a little background here: every night for the past month, the NHK weather report has sounded a bit like this (I'm paraphrasing extensively):

Weather announcer: "And tomorrow in Nagoya it looks to be [clear/a little cloudy] with a high around [8/9/10/11] degrees] during the day"...[something about how the wind or the cold is a little harsh]... "Oh, and it's snowing in Takayama!"

Takayama is about two hours to the north, and it snows there a lot.

Generally my host mother's reaction to the weather report goes a little like this:

Imao: "Oh, the weather was cold today, wasn't it? [Good thing it won't rain tomorrow/oh no, it's going to rain tomorrow!]"

And mine sounds a bit like:

Kate: "Eeee! Snow! It's snowing in Takayama!"

So of course, my host mother decided we'd have to go to Takayama ourselves just so we could see the snow. And this past Wednesday, the second-to-last-day of my break, we did.

The limited express train took us winding up through the mountains, and the scenery was absolutely arresting - we sped by tea fields in Shirakawa and threaded our way across rivers so far below us, it made me dizzy. Someday I will visit this place again, if only for the train ride. And when we disembarked at Takayama station, it was already snowing!


We visited an old folk village filled with traditional houses brought in from all over the region to be preserved, since whole areas were flooded to make way for hydroelectric power. We also stopped by several small museums and old buildings to see festival floats from the famous Takayama festival (one of the three biggest in Japan; held in April and October), a demonstration of mechanical puppets, and a lot of really old architecture and historical artifacts. Takayama also bosts the only remaining governmental admnistrative complex (jinya) in Japan - an enormously old building in which administrative officers from the Tokugawa shogunate worked, interrogated prisoners, collected taxes, and where the family of the head officer lived. The jinya was in use as an administrative office from 1692 to 1868.

For lunch, we ate fresh Hida beef, served raw, which we cooked on giant leaves propped on ceramic platforms over an open flame, in a sauce flavored with red miso and onions. Hida isn't quite as well-known as Kobe beef, but it's supposedly just as good, and here in Japan it's pretty famous. Mmm.

Also, we saw snow. Snow!