Today was the day my IIJmio sim card was to arrive! (Or at least according to tracking.) I woke up at a lovely hour of 6 am and read for several hours. After my shower I was using a 15 min free wifi trial (twice per day is okay!) when at 10 am the doorbell rang. Kuroneko Yamoto delivery service was here! I signed for the package, and he had me confirm it was the right thing. Okay is one word I can say. I guess a signature was okay as well although there is no Japanese equivalent. I had to print out my name at city hall.

I ripped that sucker open and popped the sim card in my phone. Sadly the instructions were all in Japanese. NTT Docomo showed up in the corner, confirming service. I tried turning on the mobile data, but nothing happened, boo. So I had to use google translate with chrome to locate a web version of the instructions. Apparently the IIJmio mobile network did not show up in my list so I had to manually add the APN. Not too difficult. Then I got internet for a minute before it stopped working, cries. Two hours later I get the brilliant idea to restart my phone…and bam, everything works. 4G LTE speed too! Take that all those people who said it’s quite likely your US phone won’t work in Japan or work more slowly.

Now that my phone was here, the day stretched in front of me. I desperately needed to go grocery shopping so I headed off on foot with my backpack and extra bags. The nearest store, Fressay, was about a 15 minute walk. There was a drug store and a 100 yen shop in the same complex, but I didn’t go in on this trip. Next time! I need some house décor. I took a hand basket and place it on top of a little cart and began wandering. Most is a lot of random guessing. For example, I wanted to buy real butter, so you can guess by prices and pictures as to what you really want. There’s a lot of food sections that I don’t even know how to cook with. So much fish too! The bread makes me cry though, only white or sweet stuff. At the checkout, you just place your basket on the counter and the cashier transfers everything to the next basket.

For a country that is so obsessed with sorting trash, they are incredibly wasteful. Everything is wrapped in plastic or individually wrapped. The eggplants I bought? Wrapped in plastic. The bananas? Also wrapped in plastic. I had just placed an onion in my cart, like I did in Czech Republic. I almost never plastic bagged my individual items there. The cashier said something and pulled out an extra plastic baggie to put my onion in. Sigh. I did spot another Westerner there, while checking out. I wondered if she’s another ALT. The walk back was hot, per usual. I bought some melon bread to try, and nope, it’s not for me. The bun part was good, but the melon paste too sweet. So much stuff in Japan has sugar in it. The salad dressing I bought? Also sweet!

Nanmoku Village

At about 4 pm, I caught the train with K up to Shimonita. We were planning on meeting M at the train station and she would drive us back to her village for the fire festival that night. The train ride up into the mountains was amazing. We were moving along a huge ravine where the river flowed through. Such a narrow track as well, bushes and trees on both sides. We exited at Shimonita only to feel raindrops! Noooo, neither of us had brought an umbrella. Hopefully, it’d only drizzle. We walked a little bit around the train station before M arrived. Beautiful views of the mountain, mist, and river. I’ll have to check it out further once I start teaching at their high school.

The drive to Nanmoku Village didn’t take more than 15-20 minutes. M’s village stretched out quite long, snuggly nestled amongst the mountains. She drove us to her house so that we could walk from there to the festival. She has a lovely location on the side of a mountain and across a river. She can fall asleep to its rushing. We got a grand tour of her place, but luckily didn’t spot Malcom, her mukade. She has a really big place, but definitely a little older than mine. It was super cute and homey. We headed off to walk over to the festival. We ended up following a small group of people. It had stopped raining at this point. The walk took about 15 minutes. There were lots of people with umbrellas set up. Several down in the river bed. Apparently the display would take place on a bridge. There were some food stands selling cold udon, drinks, and some type of chilled tomato?? We saw lots of M’s students and teachers.

We crossed the bridge and heading down towards the river. We ended up meeting the other ALTs that had planned to visit. As we stood there, the drizzle recommenced. We moved under some branches to seek shelter. It didn’t help though, because the sky got super gray and it really started raining on us. I stuck my camera under shirts and bent over to try to protect it and my purse. M and I felt pretty stupid that we had forgotten to grab her raincoat and umbrella when we had stopped at her house. It was wet. Really wet. I got quite soaked through, my second shower of the day. Eventually M and I decided to seek shelter somewhere because it didn’t look like the rain was giving up. All the bug spray I had applied earlier, washed off.

We crossed the bridge and headed for the shrine’s gateway. The people there shifted around and made space for us. Thus we passed a good chunk of time. It was at least pretty to look at. Not being in the rain felt better too as we slowly started to dry off. Finally, we heard some drums. The festival was starting. We emerged and headed back out into the rain. Luckily it had slowed down. People started lighting giant hay bales on fire and swinging them in circles. Such strength! There were even little kids doing it down by the river. As the night progressed, the rain stopped. The fire looked cooler and cooler with darkness. It was kind of cold though in our soaked clothes. There were even lanterns that some kids had drawn.

Finally M and I decided we were too cold and that we would head back to her place. I bought some udon for dinner from her middle school students. They even spoke to me in English! “How may I help you?” and told me the price. Cute :3 Back at her place, M lent me a fleece and I took off all my wet tops. SO much better being dry-ish. My shorts were luckily my hiking quick dry kind. I settled down at her kotasu to eat dinner while she kindly made tea. K and two of ALTs from the festival made their way to her place too. We hung out for a bit. S said that he could drive us all back to Shimonita since that’s where he lived.

The four of us piled into his car and made our way back on the curvy, dark roads. We stopped at 7-11 so that they could grab some dinner and we could hit up the ATM. I was starting to run low on cash. Then it was back to the train station. The ticket machine had all the station names in kanji so I accidently over paid for my ticket because I selected the wrong stop. It was only about 100 yen though. There was one other person on the train back down, ha, at 9:45 pm. Because my station attendant was already gone, I had to exit the train from the first car and give my ticket to the driver. I made it home easily in the cooler weather.