Bus Trip

Today we went to Lake Tazawa about 1h40 away. It's the deepest lake in Japan. The scenery was beautiful with the mountains that surround the lake and the sun shinning on the golden lady.

Me at Lake Tazawa

Golden Lady

The legends says that the golden lady is the goddess of the lake, she was transformed into a dragon and lives a the bottom of the lake. After lunch some of us went swimming to try and find the dragon! No success! But the water was really nice.

Lunch at the lake

The next stop of our bus trip was Kakunodate Samurai Mours, we visited two samurai houses. The first was build 200 years ago, our guide was the twelfth generation of this samurai family. The houses are very small but very beautiful with nice views on their gardens. The gardens have a lots of plants, flowers, trees and ponds. They grow very tall trees in there gardens, one was 4m wide and 30m high.
The next house was a smaller house but had a huge garden, with a tea shop in the middle. We stopped for tea and apple pie ;)

Trygve and I in a samurai house

Samurai armor

The tatamis floor

In both houses you had to take our shoes off to walk around because of the tatami floor. I heard that this is how they compare houses sizes, in the number of tatamis you can fit!

Gardens

Powdered green tea and apple pie