Just got back from an awesome adventure in the mountains outside of Sapporo, where my host family took me to a famous mineral spring (near the base of the moutain in the picture). Pretty amazing stuff, no doubt. Thats my host mother and I in front of the mountain on the drive up there.

At the spring we wandered around and drank the water, which some people collected by the kiloliter, using big plastic bottles and carts on wheels (we collected a single bottle). On the way back down to Sapporo, we stopped at another spring (a hot one) and dipped our feet for a bit (that's my host mother's daughter and husband). Near this hot spring was another Shinto shrine [edit: not Shinto, actually Buddhist], with an awesome cave full of statues of Buddhas and such.. pretty cool place, and I got a little fortune thing (O Mikubi) which was apparently the best one you could get, although I could only read a tiny bit of it.

Last night we went out to a buffet sort of restaurant, only with a grill built into the center of the table, so we cooked our own meat and vegetables. They also had all sorts of other stuff of course, sushi and ice cream and fruit and on and on and on.. fun stuff, and it was cool that we all had to kinda help each other cook while we ate, to keep stuff moving around. The picture is of me eating sushi, which my host family is still impressed by.. I tried to explain to them that I really like some sushi, but I don't think they believed me.

Before that, Emily and I went to the flower festival in the middle of Sapporo (Odori park, if you have a map) and wandered around the crazy shopping mall city nearby, where we ate some ramen for lunch before going to Emily's host mother's house for an informal tea ceremony lesson, which was pretty interesting.. including rare and expensive treats from the southern end of Honshu and family heirloom tea cups worth something like 20,000 dollars! wow.

We'll have time tomorrow (Monday) to post another blog entry and upload some more pictures, so I'll stop here.

Aaron