Gujo Hachiman again!
by mikka
above: I took an identical picture back in July, when the weather was nicer.
Last weekend, Yuka invited us to join her and her friends on a photo-taking expedition to Gujo Hachiman, one of my favorite places in Japan. Since Yuka was the one who recommended Gujo Hachiman to us in the first place last July, this wasn't a particularly huge coincidence, but Iain and I still jumped at the chance to return to the place we'd both fallen in love with over the summer.
above: no jumping off bridges this time.
So on Friday night, at 2 am, we all piled into Satoshi's car, and drove 5+ hours to Gifu Prefecture. Or, Satoshi drove, and we curled up with blankets in the back seat and promptly lost consciousness. It was surprisingly comfortable (or not, considering how I always fall asleep during car rides anyway).
The expedition had been organized by some of Yuka's photography friends, so there was much milling about taking photos of things, though it was clear some of the group's priorities lay elsewhere...
above: 400 yen gets you that paper cup filled to the top with a nice cold cup of breakfast sake.
... namely, drinking bottles of sake at a lovely sake shop that opened its doors at 10 am. As you can see from their blog entry here, they seemed happy enough to host Yuka's friends for a drink or seven. Several of the group spent the whole morning there.
Not us, though - we shook off the effects of a really big glass of early morning sake by climbing up a mountain...
or hill, I guess. It was much more pleasant in the winter than it was in the summer.
To me, the best thing about Gujo Hachiman is the way you can spend hours wandering around getting pleasantly lost, enjoying the quiet; other than taking a lot of photos and eating a lot of really good food, we didn't get up to too much. Iain picked up a really big snowball...
...for a few seconds.
We re-enacted this statue, with the massive snowball standing in as the horse (obviously)...
...spent a few hours out of the cold in my new favorite coffee shop ever (overlooking the river!)
Also, this was going on in the river. More on that later!
