This week was pretty uneventful. I did go over to Leah's for a small dinner party, which was fun, but I was mostly looking forward to Illuminations on Friday. Illuminations, or 光の祭典 (hikari no saiten, festival of lights), has been slowly set up in Kitakyushu for the past few weeks. Christmas trees made of lights started appearing, lights were hanging from more and more trees, and a foot bridge was slowly covered. Friday was when they finally turned on all the thousands of lights.
There are lights everywhere! Lights are hanging from trees, scaling buildings, and covering bridges. There are lights at Kokura station decorating pillars and hanging from the overhang. Lights are in the shape of different animals, even our Kitakyushu mascot is made out in lights in front of a multicolored Christmas tree. The bridge has benches in the middle with lights arching overhead and even the river banks are lit up.
I had plans to meet some friends by Riverwalk to see all the lights, but I got so excited I couldn't wait. I went an hour early to check it out myself. I'm glad I did because there was a live performance going on that I would have missed otherwise. A Japanese group was singing English Christmas songs. I would normally say it is way too early for Christmas songs, but with all the lights and happy people the music fit pretty well. I walked around for a bit before meeting my friends, who told me as Christmas gets closer even more things will add to the lights that are already out.
The next day I went out with Juha, Kyoko, and Caol to climb Mt. Nuki. We left a little late and didn't end up getting to the train station until 1:30. We also underestimated how long it would take to walk from the train station to the mountain trail. We had to walk to a lake from the train station, which took us about twenty minutes. We passed beautiful temple on the way, but didn't stop for fear of losing time. We also passed a group of お祖父さん (ojiisan, grandfathers) on the way. We asked them about how long it would take to make it up to the top of the mountain and they sort of laughed at us and told us we wouldn't make it.
We continued anyway and soon made it to the lake. We had to walk around the lake in order to start our hike up the mountain and found a path through a bamboo forest. The path seemed a bit overgrown in places, but we continued anyway. When we got to the other side and met back up with a road we found this sign facing away from us:
We soon reached another forest path, one that was definitely not closed. We started to climb, but we were worried about losing the sun since it was starting to go down. The trails we were taking were in the middle of the woods and we would have a very hard time getting back if the sun set and we lost our light. We hiked for about another hour, but were still about an hour away from the top. We stopped on a smaller peak of the mountain and had a picnic dinner (we had brought bento with us) before turning back. We were sad not to make it all the way up, but the sun was almost behind the mountains and it was dark by the time we reached the train station.
We did quickly stop at the temple we had seen before because we wanted to check it out. There was a fortune machine there and we all got fortunes. My fortune was the best luck, so I kept it with me.
We headed back to Kokura, where Caol and I met Dave for dinner. He showed us a really nice little street full of restaurants I hadn't seen before and the food was amazing. After dinner we went to karaoke before heading home for some much needed sleep.
Next weekend I'm helping out at an elementary school to teach the students about Thanksgiving. It should be a lot of fun!
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