This post might be a bit amusing, inadvertently—my notes are scrambled at this point lol but I’ll try to piece the day together.
Oh yeah, so it was pouring down rain in Takayama so we decided on a day trip to Toyama… we got to the train station a little early so we thought we’d be adventurous and so we ventured in to a local coffee-shop sort of place.
And then we found it! The quintessential Japanese insanely high-tech sushi lunch place: you do all your ordering from an iPad and stuff gets delivered to you automatically!
And then suddenly it’s dinner time, our very last chance to check out Hida Beef! This restaurant is only our second repeat of the trip. The old lady (for lack of a better description) was happy to see us again, and this time we ordered more sensibly then before: steamed beef slices, charcoal-grilled slices, let the beef speak for itself!! This meal in a word? “Fantastic!” Hah we ordered a bottle of Dark Horse Red Blend (normally the shittiest wine in the gas station) but it totally worked here, no regrets!
This meal was everything we could want, some of our best moments here.
And then…. it was over.
This is sort of a personal note, so cover your eyes haha but tonight I got suddenly blindsided by one of those rare but unmistakable “experience & remember this exact moment” directives. I have had only a few of these in my lifetime, so when one hits, it really hits. And what it told me was that this, right now, this exactly is the moment to sear into my brain—being with my son, smelling the cool humid mountain air with the fir-tree scent all around, this simple act of walking down the empty echoey street in small-town Japan, seeing our welcoming hotel lit up a few blocks away, the black sky arching overhead, just… everything. It hit me suddenly, and pretty damn hard, and I concentrated on this moment and on this memory as hard as I possibly could. It was special.
And after that life-altering shock of a moment, next thing I knew we were up in our room, watching “Raiders of the Lost Ark” in Japanese lol enjoying a vending machine Kirin beer as a well-deserved night-cap 😀
Life goes on.
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