Camping in Nagano

This weekend there was a "camping" trip to Nagano, and by camping I mean staying in an onsen and spending a few hours in nature. Regardless it was a lot of fun. It was a JSP/ TIU student event; a chance to meet new people, bond and practice Japanese/ English. I made a lot of friends, so that was cool. We went to this lake where I went canoeing with two new friends and then later hiking with a bunch of new friends. The lake was really small, but really pretty. We stopped on a shore where there were a bunch of Shinto statues. Some JSPers swam, and I was going to but then we were told it was not allowed. Oh well. The weather was great too, which was a relief since it's been raining for the past week. The area we were in has lots of ski resorts because in the winter they get 10+ feet of snow. We hiked up some of the trails toward the ski lifts, there were great views from there.

For lunch we ate mochi that we got help make. Mochi is basically smashed sticky rice. You smash it with a huge mallet on a specially carved stump/stand. I got to do the last 10 hits. The mallet was heavy and the mochi was sticky, it was a lot of fun. Plain mochi doesn't really taste like much, just rice. We had it in a soap, which was strange, since I'm used to mochi as a sweet.

At night we had a campfire and roasted marshmallows, which was a first for all the Japanese kids, most of them didn't seem to like it that much, which I don't understand. The marshmallows here don't taste the same, and some of the ones we had were flavored, so I had a few banana flavored roasted marshmallows, which was strange.

On Sunday morning we whittled our own chopsticks out of pieces of bamboo. It was really fun. At first it was really hard, tough to get the hang of. The second one was much easier and I finished it much faster. I'm proud of them, I spent a long time on them and I think they came out really well. For the rest of the day I took pictures holding them.

There are this fuzzy inch worms here that Japanese people are terrified of, it's actually pretty funny. They said it was poisonous and not to touch it, but I picked it up with a stick and some of the Japanese kids would run for their lives if I got near them with it.