A weekend in the Japan Alps

Last week there was "Golden week" in Japan, which means, that there are a couple of holidays in a row. Jennifer and me were really lucky and we were invited to stay at Jennifer's flatmate's (Kae's) place in Hakuba for 3 days. Hakuba is a little village located in the Nagano area, about 4 hours by bus from Tokyo.

Right after arrival we were offered tea and planned our trip minutiously (as typical in Japan) together with Kae's mother. The plan was to visit the local festival early on Sunday morning, then get picked up by Kae's mother, visit the skiing resort and a fleamarket and head to an Onsen afterwards.
Because Kae had to work in the skiing resort, her mother took care of us and drove us everywhere. So she dropped us at the station of the shuttle bus to the festival and told us to come back here at lunchtime and call her, when we're ready. The festival turned out to be a "hiking festival" and all the visitors walked together from stop to stop. On the way there were lots of food and drink stalls and you got everything for free. It was traditional Japanese food and very delicious. We were the only foreigners, so we were approached many times, where we're from, what were doing here etc. We tried to communicate in Japanese as good as possible and had a lot of fun.
The only problem was, that we realized a bit late, that it's 1pm and we're still hiking... Additionally we had no idea how to get back, where we were and how long this hike is gonna take. As Jennifer's mobile was ringing and Kae's mother called us, we were kind of speakless. We had no idea how to explain her our situation in Japanese... :-) We finally went to a random elderly man, passed him the cell phone with words "nihon-go, nihon-go" (= Japanese), he looked a bit confused, but took the phone and explained to Kae's mother where we are. So she drove all the way there and picked us up...
Fortunately the rest of the programme could be carried out as planned. We went to the bottom of the skiing slope, had an ice-cream and did "people-watching". It was really funny to sit there and watch people having barbecue on one side and coming down the slope on skis and snowboards on the other side, it was about 25°C warm.
Kae's mother was really sweet and very, very talkative. She kept on talking, even if we had no clue what it was about, she explained us how to wash our body in the onsen and cooked very nice food, further more she insisted to invite us whereever we went.

On Monday we decided to go up the mountain and have a closer look at the skiing area. This was actually not the best idea. First of all because the weather changed and secondly, because it was the beginning of Mai and was exactly like in Switzerland: overpriced self-service restaurant and gondola ride, plashy snow and not even the best view. The only difference was that they served noodle soup and "kare" (= curry) instead of "Gärschtesuppe" and "Röschti".
Anyway we made the best out of it and enjoyed a nice Japanese lunch, when were down again.