Golden Week 2019: Waterfalls, New Friends, and Animals

on

After our big hike on the Monday of Golden Week, Dan and I decided to chill for the rest of the week. This was partially encouraged by the very typical bank holiday weather – the world over it seems to rain on bank holidays – but also because we truly had exhausted ourselves with the unplanned but glorious Monday stomps.

Tuesday and Wednesday passed in a haze of getting wet in the rain and completing some life chores, like paying the rent, blerg. On Thursday we decided to up the anti again and take a trip to a waterfall, known as one of the top ten waterfalls in Japan! Quite the accolade…

The waterfall is in the West of Tokyo and is called Hossawa Falls. You can find it along the Chou Line from central Tokyo and take a refreshing hike in the mountains before or after enjoying the waterfall. It was quite a picturesque experience and we were surprised to find that not many people were out in the sunshine enjoying it; despite it being Golden Week!

On Friday we had lunch planned with some new friends from Mitaka. Mitaka is the area that International Christian University, my new uni from August, can be found. Some awesome members of the community in Mitaka have set up a group called Glocal Mitaka; a global volunteering group which encourages community members to engage with international and Japanese students at ICU. We were lucky enough to be invited to lunch by group members, so we had a great afternoon meeting with them and sharing stories. In a few weeks time we will be volunteering at a reading group with Glocal Mitaka. I will write more on that afterwards, but it will be the chance to support some local children to enjoy reading and language learning.

The weekend of Golden Week saw us enjoy some more animals in Tokyo. We headed out of the city again to a very small zoo called Hamura Zoo. It was quite a local experience, as the zoo was extremely small! However, we managed to enjoy the company of the glorious Red Panda once more and we even fed some Giraffes! FUN.

Golden Week 2019 saw us holiday at home in Tokyo. In doing so we saved a ton of money and had a really enjoyable time! Cheers Tokyo.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *