This year for Halloween I visited some of my old friends from Aobadai. We made some good food and had a small party.

The mountain for my hiking club this month was Yaguradake. Close to Hakone it has a decent view of Mt. Fuji as well as southern Kanagawa. Only being 870 meters it did not take very long to get to the top. I actually made it up 15 minutes before anyone else in my group. It was a warm day and when we started climbing it was more like summer than fall, however as we neared the top the fall colors started to appear.

Since coming back to Japan this year I have not been rock climbing. My old rock climbing gym is now a bit too far away to go to so I had to look for a new one. The one I found was not too far away in Chogo town called J-Wall. It is a bit of a walk from the station, but the walk is through a small town and is quite nice. Luckily as I was going to check the gym out for the first time it was the day of the Chogo town festival. Chogo is a small town and thus it was a small festival, but there were lots of people and complete with mochi-tsuki. The gym was a lot bigger than I had thought, and from my day there it seems the people are very friendly and there are plenty of different challenging walls. My arms hurt for now, but I am planning to go back soon.

Chogo festival.

Mochi-tsuki.

J-Wall

Upon reaching Taipei I headed out for Shinlin night market. I stood in line for a deep fried chicken steak, one of the famous foods at the night market. I also walked around the market and tried a lot of other foods. Everything in Taiwan is delicious. Of course I stopped in for a foot massage as well, another one of Taipei’s specialties.

I was not aware of this fact before going to Taiwan, but the Monday was a national holiday(Taiwan National Day). Not only that it was their 100th so there were a lot of special celebrations around Taipei including a military parade complete with tanks, helicopters, jets, and skydivers. I was only able to enjoy half of the day before heading to the airport and back for Japan.

Delicious chicken steak

Breakfast. I dont know exactly what it was, but it was good.

Taiwan celebrations…

For the long weekend I went to Taiwan. I wanted to do some hiking while I was there, so I found a Taiwan hiking group on the internet. The original plan was to do some beautiful hikes that were deep in the Taroko gorge in the Taroko National Park, however due to rain and a giant mud slide that took out the road we were only able to do a some hikes around the base of the gorge The first day was fairly nice weather, that is until we got up to the top of the mountain at which point it got very cloudy thus blocking any views of the surrounding area. The hike back down along the river was actually very nice but also somewhat familiar. The next day was nonstop rain so we only went up to the temple for a little bit before I headed out for Taipei.

Hiking up

Pointing to the mountain I wanted to go, however from this point on the clouds rolled in and we couldn’t find the correct path to the top.

Traversing a land slide.

(more…)

My Swiss friend invited me to run an ‘ekiden’ with him and his running group. We had a total of 4 men/women mixed teams of 4 people each running about 5 kilometers. My friend, Daniel, and I were on different teams but we were both running the second lap. I didnt have much time in the previous month to train for the run so I was going into this without any preparation. Daniel’s teammate arrived first and so had a head start. My teammate arrived about 3 minutes later at which point my goal was to catch up with my friend somehow. I started off pretty fast and was passing a lot of people, but around the half-way point I started to cramp up. Regardless, I continued on. Around the 4 kilometer mark I finally caught up with him!, but at that point my stomach was very cramped and I didnt want to run anymore. Yet I kept fighting the pain and kept running trying to keep up with my friend who had a steady pace the entire time. We crossed the line and handed it off to the next runner about the same time. I sat down to rest.

My overall time for the 5k was about 22 minutes.

My team.

My friend.

The starting runners.