Golden Week '07

The annual national holiday consortium known as Golden Week took place this past week. Monday, Thursday, and Friday were holidays. On Saturday and Sunday, Meg and I tooled around the city and went to Tamagawa park to lay in the sun and throw the frisbee. Then Monday, we went to Takao in west Tokyo for a leisurely day trip 'out of the city'. Tokyo proper is shaped like a baked potato and stretches quite far to the west, where the main city center is on the far east end of the potato. We took a train for 50 minutes and were suddenly in the lush green mountains, country air, and still in Tokyo. It's really bizarre. At Takao, we took a cable car up the mountain to the top, where there is a gathering of small shrines and a monkey area with 35 Japanese snow monkeys running around like crazy. We sat watching them for an hour or so, they are so interesting. They abide by a linear heirarchy in each of their little communities. In this particular one, even the zoo keepers (monkey attendants?) are included in their hierarchy, which is wholly determined by the monkeys themselves. Only a few of the keepers are higher than the alpha male monkey and a few of them are even ranked in the lower half. If one of the keepers in the lower half tries to approach the top monkey or give him food, the other monkeys freak out as if to say, "Dude, what are you thinking? You know the rules!" The rules being: do not mess with monkeys ranked higher than you or we will all kick your butt.

Tuesday and Wednesday were rainy and we had to work.

Thursday I just took it easy and caught up on some errands. Friday we went to Mitake, again in west Tokyo but farther out, this time about 1hr 30min. And still in Tokyo. On the train ride out to Mitake you pass the Yokota US Air Force Base. Meg said it was the only place to get a Burger King Whopper when she was growing up. Apparently, they have Taco Bell, too, which exists no where in Japan outside US military bases. In the 1970's, the US gave half of the land back to Japan and that half is now a large park where people gather for outdoor barbeques and so on. Once we arrived to Mitake, we took a bus to a cable car to ride up half the mountain. Then you can hike or take a chair lift to the very top where there is a shrine. We choose to hike the rest of the way and then hiked to the neighboring mountain, Hinode. The view from the top of these mountains is crazy. Looking into Tokyo, it feels like you're looking at New York City from Colorado. We chose an alternate path to hike down Hinode and after a few hundred meters we were the only people within a 1 km radius. Having something like that available just a short distance outside the city is amazing. We hiked passed waterfalls and vast areas of ceder trees that were planted after WWII in order to rebuild Tokyo. The ceders are not indigenous and create a lot of pollen that covers Tokyo in the springtime, causing many people to walk around the city wearing those funny white surgical face masks.

Finally on Saturday we went to Tokyo DisneySea. One day when I checked into my gym they were having some promotion and I won two free vouchers for Disneyland and DisneySea in nearby Chiba. Sweet, ok. So we went to check out DisneySea which supposedly caters more to adults and rode four rides and grabbed some lunch in about 4 hours. We were expecting it to be crowded for Golden Week but it wasn't too bad. All of the rides were indoors, which makes regular rides seem scarier, like Space Mountain. It was nothing too hardcore, it is Disney after all, but it was fun to get out and do something different.