We were allowed to get a little more sleep and enjoyed a delicious breakfast alltogether. Our first tourist point than was the stunning Adachi Art Museum, which not only shows some amazing pieces of Japanese art, but also has presents a couple of Japanese gardens of absolutely superb quality. Everything very high-class and deeply inspiaring!
I cannot imagine, that anyone of us could have been hungry at that point, but we drove to a restaurant of a Ryokan, where we had a massive lunch. It was really delicious, but I still felt a little bit like being fatted. Speciality was mixed squish on rice with broth. Another idea to try to recreate at home.
We went to two tea houses. In the first we „just“ saw the beautiful garden and the tea house itself, in the second we also had some sweets and matcha. The sweets were delicious, one with ginger flavor, the other some kind of mochi with a green sugar crust. The woman who served us the tea bowed in a different way than we learned. I was told, that they also wear their Fukusa (a cloth used for cleaning the tea utensils in front of the guest) not on the left, but the right side as the other side was reserved for the sword. It is so amazingly interesting to learn all these details. With every element added to my knowledge the wish to continue the way of tea when I’m back in Germany grows.
In a short „free time“ break of not even one hour we visited three houses and museums such as the house, where Lafcadio Hearn lived in for some time. He wrote a lot of books about Japan in the late 19th century, which were published in the western world. It was quite interesting to see how a western person lived a Japanese life around that time.
You might think, this already is enough sightseeing for one day, but nope – we went to the Gessho-ji, a temple surrounded by a beautiful, deep forest. Impressive graves of the Matsudaira family, which ruled the area, and a giant turtle stature create the feeling of visiting an important monument. The moskitos were a little… well, moskito-ish.
Only after all this program we returned to the Ryokan, had a break and then another mouthwatering, extended dinner. And sometimes it’s good to always switch of, when people around you talk in another language – they can really surprise you, such as the Musabi tea club did, when they handed me a paper board with small messages and a cute drawing of me. They were preparing that over the day and I totally had no clue. Man, so heartwarming.
It’s a bit sad, we didn’t had this trip before the end of the semester. I got to know many of the students better than before. But what a wonderful experience. And language might be a barrier, but it’s still possible to talk about politics and socials. Me like that! 🙂
