And now: What Kristen Does in Japan, episode 10ish

Hi hi hi! I'm still alive. A couple teachers who lived in the Takamatsu area went back to the grand old U.S., and my average daily commute has since jumped from 1-ish hour per day to an overwhelming 3.5 ish hours per day... Despite the long hours, I'm still getting around to see the local attractions. This week's adventure: Unpenji.




Unpenji is located at the top of a mountain -- to get there this time of year, you have to take a -whatsitcalled, uh tram/ski lift type thing up the side of the mountain. At the top, to the left is a snowboarding area complete with man made snow, and to your left is one of the 88 temple areas of Shikoku.
I don't know much about the temples and will read up on it (if I can get google.jp to come in English...) but, what I thought made this particular area interesting were all of the stone sculptures -- there are hundreds of life-size men surrounding the main area, some of them holding weapons, I assume to protect the shrine.







And, as always, the food commentary section of the blog:
This week I went to lunch with Chitomi, a franchise owner of a Gem School in Takamatsu -- here we are eating something that she ordered, which included rice, pickles, cabbage, fried oyster and mushrooms and miso soup. Ahhhh miso soup. How I am growing to love you.

Lest you think that every day here in Japan is a culinary feast such as the above, here is a picture of my roomie, Amberlyn, at home. I came out of my room one evening to find her here, sitting in front of the microwave with our hiragana/katakana dictionary. What cracks me up is that she dragged a chair over....
The one time we figured out the microwave, it heated up some rice very nicely and then sang a little theme song. I'm sure we could get it to roast turkeys, clean the apartment and rent movies from the local geo if we could figure out what all the buttons do...