beautiful even on a rainy day!

Hi everyone!  No, I am not talking about myself in the title.  oh ho ho!  Just wanted to get you in a good mood before I apologize for the month between posts.  Greetings from Japan where it is pretty cold and Christmas music is already a-playing in stores because there is no Thanksgiving buffer here between Halloween and Christmas.  Japanese people and their ability to grasp onto certain western traditions and take them to extremes.  *sigh!*

Anyway, as my mom was kind enough to remind me this morning, it has indeed been over a month since I last posted.  sorry, sorry, but as I think I mentioned before, my life here is just not as interesting as it was in my first year or even in my second year.  But, I did have some fun adventures yesterday, so I thought I would at least share some pictures and a bit of narrative.

So as you may or may not know, Kim and I lead a weekly English conversation class.  One member of our class is a really outdoorsy kind of person, so he offered to take us hiking, which we gladly accepted.  He is actually a trained hiking guide so he really knows his trails.  Unfortunately it was raining yesterday, but we went anyway, just on a different route than he planned.  He drove us to Togakushi, which is a mountain in Nagano.  It has a huge ski park and it's pretty well known for the awesome ninja house, but it also has some gorgeous shrines, one of which we went to see.  I should mention that in my rain-logged stupidity, I did not take any pictures of the actual shrine!  But it's ok because mostly the walk to the shrine was amazing and the shrine itself was pretty usual. 

tree hugging.  mostly to show how big the tree was.

Apparently these are 400-year-old cedars.

The snow up here is powerful.  It piles up and is heavy enough to cause the trees to bend like this,

Part of the shrine area, but not the shrine itself.  Sorry.

 Ok, then we got back in the car and went to a new place.  We were not sure what to expect, but we ended up at a waterfall!  It was really pretty.

Waterfall! 

sorta scary bridge.

 Then back in the car again.  Little further north into Niigata Prefecture and we ended up at Mt. Myoko.  Really pretty and also awesome for skiing/snowboarding.  We went once last winter and we will go again this winter.

This is Imori Pond with Mt. Myoko in the background.  You can see the parts that become the ski areas,  Imori means newt and the pond was named for the many many newts that live there.

Ducks!!

Imori!!

Taxidermy...  hmm.

I dream about creating a company that would prevent the printing of such signs.  But, then what would foreigners have to chuckle about when they visit Japan?!

This is on the way back to Iiyama.  We are above the clouds!

HOMG SNOW!!

And so ends our hiking adventures.