After the ryokan, we hopped in a car and drove three and a half hours, all the way to a little rice farm even more in the middle of nowhere than the earlier ryokan. We really enjoyed our stay. Some activities that we enjoyed included hiking, fishing, and impromptu cooking classes, where we learned how to make mochi, tempura, and pizza. It’s a little weird to make pizza in Japan, especially knowing that the Naples style pizza here in Japan is better that the actual pizza in Naples. Kind of funny.
One of the first activities that we did was making a Japanese rice cake called mochi. How to make it is pretty simple. You hit warm, cooked rice with a sledgehammer-sized mallet for a little while. Pretty simple, right? After you have taken your anger out on the rice, and once the rice is a doughy consistency, you take it off of the pounding block, rip a small piece off of the big hunk, and dip it in some sweet red beans, the most common mochi topping. Other toppings include sesame, seaweed, and soybean powder.
Another cooking “class” that only mom and Connor took was to make tempura. If you don’t know already, tempura is pretty much vegetables or shrimp dipped in a batter and fried in oil to make a crispy treat. One of the cool parts about the tempura experience was that, before mom and Connor started frying, they went into Kai-San’s and Setsu-San’s garden and picked the vegetables that we would use for the tempura. Now that is fresh food.
Here’s a picture of the cooking process, with Connor cooking with our other host, Setsu-San.
Since we have been away from home for nearly three months, the pizza making gave us a little taste of home. I know we had just gotten back from Italy, where the pizza there is a lot better than anything else, but our pizza still had that incredible, unmatchable taste of home cooking because our hosts had a wood-fired oven they constructed themselves.
The farm, even though we were only staying there for two nights, gave us a launching-off point to the nearby tourist attraction and village of Miyama, a charming town of beautiful thatched roof houses, amazing temples scattered here and there, and the best softserve in Japan.
Not bad for a little town with a population of only a few hundred people!
But, the farm experience might have been even better. After dinner that night, we played two traditional Japanese new years games with Kai-San. One of them was kind of a pin- the-tail-on-the-donkey game, where the object was to make someone’s face using about ten pieces while blindfolded.
The other game was simple but fun. What you do is you try to get from one side of the board (Tokyo), spiral inward, and make it to the center (Kyoto) by rolling the die and moving the number of spaces shown. The one complication was that if you landed on a spot with a red mark, it meant that you were so tired, that you have to spend another day at that inn. (Our equivalent of lose-a-turn.) The first one to make it to Kyoto wins. Elliot won once, but then I won the next game. Mom and dad were both somewhere in between. We really enjoyed the games that we played, and I hope that we will get them on Amazon once we get home.
Another highlight of our stay was getting to explore the attic of Kei-San and Sei-San’s home, which is over 150 years old and made entirely of straw.
We loved the time we spent on the farm with Kai-San and Setsu-San and would recommend the experience to anyone. If we had the choice, we would probably go back there. But we are looking forward to adventures to come, such as Kyoto, Nagoya, Hiroshima, and the Kumano Kodo trek that we are doing with our cousin, John. We can’t wait for more Japan.
Fanatical Sabbatical 