Jen's farewell camping trip

On Saturday night, I went with a number of other teachers to Hamakita Forest Park which is a hugh wildness area in the north part of my city. We went there for a farewell camping trip for a teacher who is leaving soon, Jen. Here's some pictures from that night:

Mizuyokan in bamboo

Today in my Ladies class (housewives who have traveled lots and have time on their hands for interesting hobbies and learning English), we were talking about summer recipes. One student brought in a special jelly (called mizuyokan) that she had made at home. Here's how it looked at first (jelly inside):
And then this is the jelly that was inside the bamboo:

The jelly is made from Japanese gelatin (from seaweed) and red bean paste with a little sugar and salt added. The mixture was then put in pieces of bamboo (that the woman has growing in her backyard). It's chilled and nicely wrapped in a leaf.

To get the jelly out after, we just punched a hole in the bottom of the bamboo with a sharp metal pick and the blew and the jelly came out. It was a fun and delicious snack.

Rainy weekend

I'm finding out that it's hard to predict the weather in Hamamatsu, even for the weather forecasters. Saturday was supposed to be cloudy until night time, but instead it started pouring rain in the afternoon. Unfortunately, Ayako and I were coming back from the stores on our bicycles then, so we got completely soaked.

On Sunday, it was supposed to rain throughout the day, but yet it stopped about 12 noon and turned out to be a beautiful day. We went to visit a previous co-worker and went for a walk along with her husband and her dog:
In the evening, we went to a flower park which had lots of fireflies to see at night. I took pictures but they only turned out to be a green dot against a black background, so I won't show them here. I will show you a fountain show that was amusing since it was set to romantic music:

Camping trip in Gifu

Last weekend, I went camping with Ayako and 3 other couples in Gifu prefecture. It was about a 5 hour drive from Hamamatsu. When we were getting close to the campsite, we were climbing hills on pretty narrow roads:

We got to the site and set up camp. Luckily Keisuke and Masaki go camping lots so they have lots of camping equipment. It definately felt like we were camping in style. Here are some pictures from our site and some of the activities we did:

In the late afternoon, we went fishing in a pond full of rainbow trout. I was able to catch 3 fish once I improved my technique. Total we caught 12 fish:

So then we took the fish back to our site and got them ready to have for dinner ie. scaled them, gutted them and put them on a stick:

At night, we had a campfire and I showed everyone how to cook bannock on the campfire:

The next morning, we had a delicious breakfast (much fancier than I'm use to when camping):

In the afternoon, we stopped in a nearby town called Takayama for an hour to look around their traditional area. They had lots of stores selling nice souvenirs:
And then there was the 5 hour drive back, of which I slept for most of it, so no pictures. ^^