The resort was beautiful with dome shaped rooms. I feel like a hobbit, living in Frodo's Uncle Bilbo's house, ^__^. Since it was cloudy, we can't go visit the volcano crater...so we walked around our resort.
The resort is called Aso Farm Village, with an attached strawberry farm (greenhouse with rows of strawberry trees in pots) and mushroom farm (a chilly room with fungi growing from
cheese-like rectangular medium). There are many souvenir and health food stores which offer free food tasting ^___^ hehehe...so we were half full before lunch time. Three of us shared 2 bowls of ramen for lunch...it's about USD 14, cheaper than AA jap food.
Then we went for a health inducing sauna spa thingy, which means baking us in a hellish hot room for 50 minutes. We heard crying kids who came with their parents before which I napped most of the 50 minutes...but it felt great getting out of the hot pot room.
Then we went for our dinner in a Japanese restaurant. The exotic food was truly surprising. Cold steamed egg with seafood, cold prawn seafood jelly, sashimi, bitter wine-cooked fish, sushi and veggie tempura, soup, rice and mandarin orange sorbet for desert. Our table were full with all the dishes but we hardly finished half of it. We decided that we shall never say that we love Japanese food without a second thought... but it was a truly eye-opening experience.
We intended to go to the hot spring after dinner but the all-naked policy in the hot spring was a big STOP sign for Peiying and Meichen and I have no intention of going in alone...so we went back to our dome and watched Japanese TV (a program in which contestants have to make 3 guests laugh in 50 seconds) which we didn't understand but found interesting...
The next day, our wishes written on the Tanabata bamboo tree came true. It was finally cloudless and we could go to the volcano crater to sightsee ^__^. The mountain terrains were really scenic but it was super windy and my hair is messed up in all the photos =_=||| It was really cold in the mountains, as opposed to what we three expected the temperature near a volcano were to be. There were hawkers selling shining stones and sulfur from the volcano.
Then we went to the volcano museum which was small and slightly boring...but the attached music box museum was really cool, we saw the first music box from German, the music was played by a huge rotating disc with tiny portruding metal points struck by a piano-like metal structure. The melody was beautiful. I was really tempted to buy a music box from Switzerland which plays Canon so beautifully, it was more than USD 200...wish I could learn how to play it on the piano...
On our way home, we stopped by a local shrine which looked really deserted and saw some old folks playing a wooden ball golf thingy...they were really friendly and didn't seem to mind us intruders ^__^
Then we went back to our dorm...
no lava/magma no nothing =P
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