Day 19: Oonuma Park, Karaoke, Onsens and the Talent Show

There was another earthquake last night really early in the morning. I woke up and didn't know why. I quickly found out why, however, because a few moments late my phone started screaming "地震です！地震です！" ("There is an earthquake! There is an earthquake!") and I had to go make it stop. Looking back on it, I think I remember my bed shaking a little, but I was too groggy at the time to distinguish this from dreaming.

Breakfast sandwiches (with a little bear and hello kitty on each one):

 And dessert:

Apparently the traditional dance class I went to ended up in the newspaper:

In the morning, we took a van-bus from Hakodate to Onuma Park (大沼公園）. The van ended up having somewhere around 28 people in it. It was kind of nuts. there were two seats on each side of a row, and a fold out seat in the middle. We think they switched which vehicle went on each route though (there were two) because a few stops after mine we ran out of room and another vehicle had to come get the rest of the people on that route. The people on the other route were picked up by a huge charter bus which we later all took from Onuma Park to the hotel.

The van-bus:

Onuma Park:

It was really windy and rainy.

I got a marimo puffball at the visitor's center. I really like marimos and have some in my fish tanks at home. I'd forgotten that they are famous in Hokkaido. They are sometimes called moss balls, but are actually made from algae which is shaped into a ball form from rolling around in cold, shallow lakes. They are only known to occur naturally in Iceland, Scotland; Estonia; Hokkaido, Japan; and recently Australia (which is why they are so famous here).

I'm pretty sure the park is particularly famous for bears because there were bears everywhere:

 For lunch, I went to this Udon restaurant in the park with some friends:

I was highly impressed by this painted shrimp:

 And had katsudon and a melon soda:

 The melon soda was yummy and melon-y and really cool looking.

After lunch, we looked around the gift shops for a little while:

I tried a few candy samples which were yummy.

And got a lavender soft cream. (Lavender is also famous here because there are fields of lavender near the center of the island.)

There was a big doraemon statue in front of one of the shops.

On the bus ride to the hotel, Hayley gave me one of the mushroom shaped chocolate candies she had. These things are really great:

It turns out the hotel we stayed at, Hotel Geneva, is a resort. This meant that it was kind of self contained, and not really within walking distance of anything else. It was really huge though and had ski slopes (with no snow because it's summertime),  an outdoor obstacle course (which I didn't do, but wish I had done), bowling, karaoke, a pool, hiking trails, an arcade, an onsen, and several other things.
My room had 5 people in it.
The room had snacks:

These futons which we slept on:

A 玄関（げんかん）（genkan） where you take off your shoes:

This bathroom:

This toilet room:

This view:

And this back-scratcher-thing:

There was a little shop in the basement (where most of the games were) and they sold some really cheap candy. I got a bunch of interesting candy (this whole bag for about $5) but haven't actually eaten any of it (two weeks later). I really need to stop getting candy so much faster than I'm eating it, but it's just so cool looking. I was invited to do an hour of karaoke with some friends, and got another melon soda because the karaoke fee included soda.

 Karaoke:

Hokkaido is famous for its beer (especially Sapporo's beer) so I wanted to try some and got this from a vending machine in the hotel. (The drinking age in Japan is 20.) I actually didn't really like it. Maybe it's an acquired taste, but to me it just seemed bitter and yeasty so I ended up only drinking about half and giving the rest to one of my friends.

After karaoke I ran into JD and Peiyu, and we played this colorful arcade game. It was basically just a bunch of random mini games, but was really fun. JD won by a long shot.

After that, some friends and I did a purikura booth. It's basically a photo booth, but it makes your eyes bigger, adds makeup, and has fun backgrounds and stickers you can add. You can have it send you digital copies of the photos, but unfortunately you have to have a Japanese email which none of us had.

Also, the fancy hotel gift/souvenir shop had ”おっぱいプリン”（oppai purin）= breast pudding. So that's a thing.

Dinner was really fancy, pretty, elaborate, and sort of difficult to figure out how to eat. A lot of the teachers had to come around and tell us what to do.

The tables were so jam-packed with dishes, that it was hard to know where your food ended and your neighbor's food began.

You put this into the silver pot which was over a little burning cube:

The crab was really good, and quite hard to crack until halfway through we realized there was a cracking tool in the center of the table:

 This went into the little brown pot which also had a burning cube under it. No one was really sure whether it was alive or not before being put in the pot:

 Sauces, pickled vegetables, and a kind-of-cooked-kind-of-not-cooked egg. You poured the sauce in the cup into the egg cup and then drank it. I think you were only supposed to add some of it, but I didn't realize that until after I'd poured the whole thing in. It tasted fine, but still just felt so wrong:

 This was another egg custard thing. This one had some sort of mollusk at the bottom instead of a chestnut which really surprised me because I wasn't expecting it:

 This was some sort of cooked potato or other root vegetable in soup:

 Salmon, tuna, and squid sashimi:

 This went in the silver pot with the meat:

 There were raw eggs in the center of the table and you cracked one in this dish, stirred it up, then dipped the things cooked in the silver pot in the raw egg before eating them. For some reason this doesn't feel as weird to me as slurping down a raw egg from a cup and is actually really tasty. I'm particularly fond of having enoki like this (which is that long, small, white, mushroom) because the texture is really fun:

The liver was bright green which was a little startling. A few people ate it, but we were told a lot of the time people don't. I didn't try it, but apparently it was very bitter:

The potato thing had a little lavender-shaped thing on it which I thought was cute:

Dessert:

There was also rice and miso soup which were both great. I hardly had any of the rice though, and wasn't able to finish a few of the dishes. There was just so much food.

After most people had finished eating, we started our talent show.

Here is my class preforming 「明日があるさ」（あしたがあるさ）（ashita ga arusa）:

And me:

And a wonderful mixed-class group:

And D and E class preforming a song:

After dinner, a bunch of us went to the onsen. An onsen is a hot spring bath where you wash off before entering, and then sit in all kinds of shallow pools of hot water. You also aren't allowed to wear anything in the baths, but bringing a small face towel in is fine as long as it doesn't touch the water (most people fold it up and put it on their heads while sitting in the tubs). I was only going to go for about half an hour, but really liked it and ended up staying for an hour and a half. There was a pool that was outside, a really wide pool, a smaller pool with jets, a medium sized pool with differently placed jets, a really cold small pool (about 63*F), and a sauna.
After that, I hung out with friends for a while, took a walk outside, and then went to bed.

Those snacks:

My complimentary toothbrush:

I like that it was orange. Also, Mom, please note the tiny bottle of toothpaste that came with it. It reminded me of you.