Miyashita / Mt. Fuji Park
Well, Starting where my last journal entery left off, we headed out of tokyo on the morning of the 5th... (all my stuff now is EST, not Tokyo Time, since I'm using my laptop.) We took the Shinkansen (FAST TRAIN!) to Odowara, and took a much slower train to Hakone/Miyashita, which included a few switch backs, where upon the conductor got out of the train, switched the track, and we backed onto the track that went on the higher leg. We arrived at Miyashita station, and walked the 15 minutes up/down steep hillsides to our Riyokan, which is a traditional japanese inn.
When we entered, we took off our shoes, and put on the house slippers. The hostess then took us to our room, which was bedecked with tatami matts and on-the-ground furnature. there was a sliding door that led outside, and on the doorstep there were wooden clogs. The garden in the back was very Zen, with stepping stones and very well tended plants, and a little waterfall leading into a pool with many of the large goldfish that populate the areas around here. then we went off to dinner, and I'm actually going to be lazy here and put in my sister's entery on this subject, as I'm too lazy to type the whole thing out:Sarah's accounting:So... yeah.. we're all excited after the long hike to the dinner table in the room next door. and we all sit down and notice there are complimentary shots of sweet sake at each place.... joy of all joys for me, i gave mine to jud. so, basically, by this time, i knew that this was going to be my "favorite" meal of all time. yes, yes, yes, it gets better. (ps. I feel really bad for what we did during this meal (kinda mocking the culture in some ways, I s'pose but you had to be there to understand it fully so if you're going to think omg she's such a prick and a loser, then...skip the next couple screen fulls of typing ;))... The first course was a sort of bean curd (kinda in a gellitan form that was diced up), three beans, lemon juice and some sort of seafood thing in a small clear container in the upper left of the tray. the presentation was beautiful for all o fthe courses we had that night. 
The curd, beans and juice was presented in a small, turquoise canoe looking poetry thingy mc bob in the middle of the tray. underneath, on the tray itself, was ... white powder something in the shape of a river. the river was the milky way. There's also a myth behind the river, and the river separates man and woman. Mom, inspired by Jud's recitation of the myth, took her first bite of the meal and basically dislocated her jaw.... The second course was a liquid soup (yes, you're probably thinking 'liquid soup?-- of COURSe the soup is liquid'... hahaha.. that's what I also thought...before I ate the .... like.. .fifteenth course of this meal). there was a bunch of stuff in the bowl. mom opened up the lid to her soup bowl and exclaimed 'look! there's a band aid in there!'...band aid= pressed and thinly sliced chicken. There was also another darker "band aid", which tasted pretty good but we werent' really sure what it was exactly. There was also a collection of flour dumplings in various shapes, sizes and colors. one of them was shaped as a star...and covered with gold foil which was slowly coming off in the broth of the soup....ya can't tell me that gold foil is edible...it just doesn't work that way...but the server INSISTED that it was edible...we still didnt' eat it. The biggest thing in that course was a "mystery" dumpling... which was HUGE. Mom was the first, of course, to bite into this "mystery" dumpling. she quickly discovered that the mystery was that the dumpling was basically a whole fish...bones and all. mom had bitten into it not expecting bones, but some sort of meat. Naturally, I, hating seafood with the firey passion of one-thousand suns, didn't touch it.... I was still hopefully for chicken teriyaki...The third course presented to us was seafood. joy. three kinds of fish, two balls of sauces (one ginger, the other wasabi), a whole shrimp and some random vegetables... pickled vegetables. there were also two liquid sauces that our server brought out. When ya soaked the fish in the liquid sauces for about three good minutes and then put some ginger on it, it wasn't that bad... lol. There was also something standing up in a roll in front of the shrimp... mom, of course, at it and quickly discovered that that part that she had just decided to sink her teeth into was the shrimp head, tale and legs all ground up and stuck together for presentation's sake. All the vegies were pretty bland and i tried putting some wasabi on them to make them somewhat flavorful but ended up putting on too much and having a coughing fit right as our server came back into the room (embarrassing much?). 
The fourth course was all seafood again. haha..this is by far the best course. i kid you not... ok. so it was served in a box tray... imagine.. looking down... and hating seafood... and this is what you'd see... in the middle of the tray was a snail shell full of..you guessed it...snails... complete snails.... and caviar... all stuffed into one big conch shell... to the upper left was a small white cup of something that looked like beef that was diced up. to the left of the snail was a hollow red flower. Below the snail and to the right was a crab.... not crab meat... a crab ... a whole crab.... complete with eggs on its back..... to right of the snail was a pickled potatoe and to the upper right of the snail was rice, wrapped in fish skin... the best part of the fish... ::rolls eyes:: Mom went for the "beef" in the cup and realized that.. .well.. it didn't quite taste like beef. Jud decided he was about to try it and i told him...'wait........this looksl ike it has eyes--OMG'... guess what it was.... guppies... or no, wait... tadpoles.. yes, that's right..tadpoles... each one fried and stuck into a cup. if you looked closely, you could see the tails, the eyes, the legs and even, if you looked even harder and closer, you could see the intestines through the thin skin over their stomachs.... yeah.. i didn't really decide to eat that. I did, however, eat my former mascott (the snails). Oh man.. I ate every single freakin' one of them (with a LOT of water). I also ate the rice (afer unwrapping it from the fish skin). I was the only one to eat the snail... and when i was about half way through choking it down, the hostess came in with yet another course....This course is just about what killed us, because well.. it's presentation was just... stunning... bell peppers, chili peppers, onions... and eel. yes... eel... and the kicker was that the eel's stomach had been cut off and was twisted in a loop and layed over against one side of the mound of food. between that and the guppies, it was a little too much for us americans to handle. mom started laughing and i started crying from resetraining my laughter. of course... i'm not one for eel or bell peppers or chili peppers... in fact... i pretty much loathe all of them. lol. but i really didn't have to worry about the course yet, because at that point, i was still eating my snail. :) Mom and Jud both don't like eel so they only ate the peppers.Shortly after presenting us with the eel, our server returned with another course. It was then that mom decided to ask how many meals we were going to have in total. she said...well... ten. This course that she was bringing would be the sixth course which was goop soup. The server took away mom's seafood assortment with the crab. This goop soup violated mom's food rule: something cannot be silmy and gooey... it can be either slimy or gooey... but never both. There was a mushroom at the bottom of the goop soup... she pulled it out and ate it... big mistake. It definately violated her gooey/chewy rule, but was hilarious to see the different faces that she made. From then on, she decided that she was "full" and "couldn't possibly eat anything else". By this time, I finished eating my snail (delish...) and opened up the hallow red flower that was beside the snail.... I looked in it and was like 'what is that..?' (it looked like puke) 'it's a surprise!!!'... indeed it was. after I had a bite, i was like 'it's BEEF!' jud was like 'beef?! WHERE?!' and mom looked at me and started pouting, whimpering 'she took mine away'. (you have to understand.. my mom is just as animated as I am... any face I would make is what she'd make...times ten) As soon as Jud put the beef in his mouth, he leaned all the way back in his small chair and closed his eyes, in utter bliss. The seventh course was another jello/goopy stuff, but the kicker was that on the top of the jello was calamari suckers...yes... the suckers... not the tentecles, but the suckers.... they were actually quite chewy and didn't really taste like anything and of course, i ate them. They were the perfect size to cap over one of my back molars though, so every time I bit down ,all I heard was a squish.... it was grrrreat. :PAfter that was another soup course with rice. liquid soup. fish liquid soup. which tasted horrible. at this point... it was obvious that we were not getting any chicken teriyaki. The ninth course was a tempora of some sort... not sure exactly what it was but it was actually good. And finally, the last, the tenth course was fruit. Not just any fruit: mango and watermellon--the two fruits i really don't like....yippy skippy. ----------------------------------------------------------After the night on the soba pallets, we awoke with stiff backs, got a "western" beakfast, and headed up the mountain side. We went onto a gondola style ropeway and then went to a "fantasy pirate boat" that took us around a lake, and finally a series of buses to bring us back to Odawara, and the shinkansen back to Nagoya.
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