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We had decided to spend a couple of days out of the cities of Japan, so we headed for the town of Takayama in the Japanese Alps. It is a very relaxed town, with old dark wooden buildings lining narrow streets littered with sake breweries.
We spent our first afternoon there on a self-guided sake brewery crawl, so we were a little wobbly by the time our 4pm check in came around. After a brief rest, we soon developed the munchies so headed out for some Hida beef, a type of beef that the area is famous for. We went to a restaurant that gives you slabs of beef to barbecue on the table in front of you. It was delicious and just what we needed after our afternoon's antics.
After an unsettled night sleep, maybe it was the sake and beef combination playing havoc with Claire's digestive system, we were up early to spend the day exploring the town. We headed to the morning market which, as it is recommended in multiple places, was somewhat of a disappointment. It was a nice stroll along the flower filled river bank though. We then continued our walk up a hill overlooking the town, it was a fairly slow walk as the temperature was heating up, but we came across some of the famous Japanese cherry blossom.
Our afternoon was spent in two main locations, both fairly out of the ordinary museums. The first was the Karakuri Museum, a room filled with festival masks in which we watched a bizarre puppet show. The puppets were very old hand operated wooden puppets that were used in shows, on festival floats and in people's houses. One did acrobatics, one was some strange love scene and one delivered tea! From there we headed to the other side of town, and went to the teddy bear museum. Expecting to find just a room filled with bears, we were very pleasantly surprised when we entered a labyrinth of themed rooms filled with bears from all eras, of all sizes. We successfully found everything on the 'find it' quiz, took photos of the wedding bears (of course) and found one of our favourite childhood books on a shelf...'Little Bears Trousers'. We were there for nearly two hours, even going around some rooms twice.
We rounded the afternoon off by soaking our weary feet in two of the natural hot springs in town which had been converted into public foot baths. It was an odd experience to sit in two separate hotel car parks with our feet in hot water, but after the distances we'd been covering it was a welcome little soak.
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