Got up early in the morning, and as I was packing, I was invited by one of the assistants at the hostel to eat the breakfast I had neither requested, nor paid for. Oh well, free meal (it was a little cold though – probably because I didn\u2019t know about it and got there late). Calling this day “wet” would be a vast understatement. It was not “wet”, it was “soaking”. Of course, the Gifu hostel was in the middle of a cloud at the time\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It took me around a half-hour to walk the 2.5km road back to Gifu, where I could catch the bus to the train station. By this time, I was totally soaked. I opened my backpack at the train station, and everything was soaked (all of my clothes, books, maps, etc.). I was quite worried at this point that the Awara Youth Hostel would be booked solid (I hadn\u2019t bothered to try making reservations after my first attempt). I figured that, at the worst, I\u2019d just be forced to book into a nice hotel (oh, horrors [grin]). It was nice to be out of Gifu though. It\u2019s a little like Prince George, B.C., (which is my hometown). Friends (and parents) of mine will immediately understand the reason I wasn\u2019t too fond of Gifu. It was a little small for my liking, and there wasn\u2019t much to see or do really\u2026 I would\u2019ve liked to see the cormorant fishing, but that wasn\u2019t for another month or two.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It took around 2 hours to get to Awara Onsen, and another hour or so to track down the hostel (I didn\u2019t have a map, so I had to go and ask people for directions. No problem!). Upon arriving, I found the hostel more or less empty. Eventually, an older lady showed up, and checked me in, showed me my room, and vanished. I fired up the kerosene heater, dug everything that was still soggy out of my backpack, and sat in front of the heater and read some new manga I had picked up in Gifu two days earlier while my belongings dried out. It was really very comfortable, with the tatami mats, futons, heater, etc., it really “felt” Japanese!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Two Japanese university graduate-students arrived later that night (they were heading to Kanazawa for a conference of some sort), so we all sat around chatting, watching TV (True Lies in Japanese), etc. A very good day (aside from the weather!).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Got up early in the morning, and as I was packing, I was invited by one of the assistants at the hostel to eat the breakfast I had neither requested, nor paid for. Oh well, free meal (it was a little cold though – probably because I didn\u2019t know about it and got there late). […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.senkou.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.senkou.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.senkou.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.senkou.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.senkou.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.senkou.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":56,"href":"https:\/\/www.senkou.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55\/revisions\/56"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.senkou.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.senkou.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.senkou.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}