Kagaonsen Trip 2

The second day of the Kagaonsen trip we sampled the hotel's buffet breakfast (worth the $6 cost, wouldn't have been worth $10) and took the train one stop over from Daishoji to Kagaonsen, where the local tourist bus is based.  As mentioned in previous entries, we've used this bus, called the CanBus for no reason I'm aware of, to visit Natadera temple, which is a really tremendous garden / temple complex.  The CanBus goes to a large number of other (often fairly wacky) tourist attractions that we had not yet sampled, and on this trip we planned to visit any and all of them that we pleased.  The full pictographic results can be seen on Flickr.

First up was a "Village of Traditional Crafts".  They have examples of many different local crafts, such as lacquer ware, gold-leaf, paper making, ceramics, and silk-painting, often with craftspeople working on such things right in front of you, and many opportunities to personally make lousy knockoffs during lessons offered by said craftspeople for reasonable fees.  We weren't so much in a crafty mood as interested in examining the wares for sale and watching the experts work.

 

 The "village" is a number of buildings set into a rather attractive mix of gardens and woods - nice to stroll around in, also keeps the temperature down.

 

 We didn't take many pictures inside, but this is I believe one wing of the gold-leaf building.  The area where craftspeople work is through the windows on the right.

 

They had a lily pond featuring a number of dragonflies that we took pictures of.

Changing the pace, our next stop was the Motorcar Museum of Japan.  We'd noted it on previous rides around on the CanBus but never had time to check it out - and the collection of 500 classic cars all in one place (randomly the middle of the west Japan countryside) seemed worth our tourist time and money.  They surely did have a lot of cars.

 

From sultry and unusual Japanese antiques...(Nissan, not Ferrari here)

 

 ...to no small number of buglike monstrosities.

It would have been great to be able to read all the signs and details instead of just picking out names and dates here and there, but for the roughly ninety minutes it took us to walk around and see all the cars it was a pretty good time.  

Next up, we got off the bus at the "World Glass Hall", which a large and vaguely European building, fairly inexplicably located once again in remote Japanese countryside.  It is entirely filled with things made from glass, often in Eastern European styles.  It seems that they hire glass crafting experts from Eastern Europe (we saw a lot of gaijin working in the various windowed production areas) to make nice things out of glass there, and they bring their local styles.  Glasswork from places like the Czech Republic and Hungary were on display and for sale, some of which were very nice (and very expensive) indeed.  Some more things were overly elaborate and not our style but still very nice examples of the work that could be done.  There was also an immense quantity of shlock which I happily walked past on the way to looking at nicer stuff.  Overall, fairly interesting as I don't think I've ever seen exhibits of Eastern European glasswork before, and it was free to get in which is even better.

 

They also sold locally made foods in one of the outbuildings of the glass complex, including locally made cheese.  We strongly considered buying some, but found that it was both expensive and only of questionable flavors.  This cheese is clearly marked "wasabi cheese".  I did not care to experience it.

For dinner, we finally succumbed to the advertising all over the hotel about their all-you-can-eat-and-drink steak and beer "Festa" and headed down to the hotel restaurant to find that on this particular day an individual group had bought the place out and nobody else could eat.  This constituted false advertising since all the signs clearly said that this was one of the days that the "Festa" was being offered, and we were quite cross about being denied the incessantly advertised steak and beer, especially knowing that there are not so many restaurants in Daishoji.  We'd had the pick of the litter the night before.  Spitefully, we were forced to go buy a lot of takeout from the grocery store and cake from a pastry shop, then eat it in bed while watching the "Good, the Bad, and the Ugly" and drinking wine, which was perhaps not so bad.  It might even have been better than the "Festa" would have been, based on our guesses about small hotels in the countryside and what they may incorrectly consider to be steak.

Many more dragonfly pictures available through Flickr. The next day we once again board the CanBus for adventure, and rabbits.  Be on the lookout for that entry soon.