So, this weekend I stuck around Katashina. Sunday marked the village's SPORTS DAY! (this is a massive event taken with all seriousness.. I had to go to 2 practices in preparation). It began with tasting all the festival food they had. I even fronted making my students practice English when in actuality I was just making them give me some of whatever they were eating. Then was my event... the 100 meter sprint. I guess I was concentrating more on not messing up than I was at warming up so that when my turn came I gave a fairly poor attempt. I came in a solid 4th with two pulled quads and maybe even a pulled groin. After struggling to smile as everyone gave me their congratulations, a man informed me that I would also be running in the relay. Needless to say this was also both excruciating and pathetic. Afterwards, I was sitting at my house, icing my poor legs when two women came to my door and invited me to the dinner and drinking party for the sports day. After taking the necessary Advil I went and had my cup filled and topped off countless times with beer by the village folk, all becoming increasingly confident with their English and wanting to congratulate me on my spectacular performance from earlier that day. We moved to the village karaoke bar where I did a crowd pleasing rendition of a song by The Carpenters. I headed to bed early because I was to meet a teacher from the Junior High at 7:30am the next day to do an 8 hour climb of a nearby mountain....
I woke up in surprisingly less pain that I had anticipated, got ready and met up with the teacher. The first stretch of the climb went really well. It was a gorgeous day, we practiced our Japanese/English, and climbed along this amazing ridge line, looking out on the valley and mountains in the distance. Strangely, there was a huge techno festival nearby so between the bird calls we could here the unz unz unz of techno bass lines. We summited around noon and to eat a hearty lunch. However, as I pulled out my sandwich, my friend begins to pull out a whole gas stove and pot for water. I didn't realize that we were going all out for this lunch and my contributions were looking increasingly pathetic. Even so, the lunch was great and we moved on to take a different route back to the car. Although he warned me that it was a little more difficult, I wasn't entirely prepared to summit two more peaks, do some rock climbing, basically slide down really steep hills, re-pull both quads, scrap some knees, and plead for the end. All in all though, it was great. Although when he (as chipper as ever) turned and said to me at the end "Great hike, huh?" all I could think to say (as I was disheveled with a muddy shirt, dirt and scrapes all over my legs, and my whole body dripping in sweat) was "call the paramedics." The day ended nicely as I experienced my first onsen (bathhouse), and sat in a outdoor pool watching the sunset and trying to ignore all of the quick looks I was getting from all the women who had never seen a naked foreigner before.
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