Having Tatsu visting us at Fuji

My friend, Tatsu decided to make a visit to the Fuji visiting my family and myself before hitting on the road to the east. That's right. He will be departing Japan in a couple of weeks for his journey to the south east asia after 7 years of great work experience here in Japan. How exciting does it sound? I am quite envious that he is capable of doing this, as I have a great interest in doing a volunteer work somewhere in east asia. But I guess there is timing and opportunity for everything that happens in life, you know? Although I think I won't be hitting on the road myself sometime soon, I have a faith that it will turn into a reality within mein near future. :)

Anyway, my mom drove me to the highway bus stop, and the bus just arrived, so we were able to meet up with him right away. He looked great with his funky curry hair-do, and looked fresh with his white shirt anda dark brownish jeans. My mom's tensionall of a sudden hit the cloud in the sky, and got super energetic. LOL It's cool to see her all happy to have a guest like this though. We came back to my house,and I showed him around. Then my dad took

us to the kitaguchi hongu fuji sengen jinja, an ancient shrine and the starting point for the
Mt. Fuji pilgrimage. We walked thru an entrance path lined with mossy stone lanterns and reached to the jinja area. Here is a few of photos that I took there:

This is the entrance of the fuji kitaguchi hondo (northern path to the top of mt. fuji).
Tatsu made a quick trip all the way to the top with a cane and all only in his mind. LOL

Thenmy dad took us to the lake yamanakako, which is one of five great lakes at the foot of mt. fuji. Around this time, the weather got a little chilly that we did not get to see the face of mt. fuji. But my dad took us to a hotel at the top of a mountain to see if we could take a quick view of the lake and fuji. Although wecould not see the fuji due to foggy weather, it was still nice to have a smell and sound of peaceful nature there. We came back to my house, and chilled in the living room wathing a partial of my favorite, "Napoleon Dynamite" LOL Tatsu was going to leave for Tokyo at 8pm, so my parents kindly parepared our supper and we ate in one of the guest rooms of the restaurant. We had a draftbeer for kanpai.

During the meal, Tatsu was convinced to stay a nite over thanks to the ongoing dishes made by my folks (LOL), so we later joined my parents in the living to continue our meal in much relaxing manner.

There, we had more alcohol to drink and more food to eat. My dad showed his treasure boxes to Tatsu and both parents joyfully shared a conversation with him. The highlight of the nite was
when my mom brought a shamisen (traditional Japanese three-string instrument, which
maybe remembered as one of the instruments played by the geisha). All of them tried playing it and had a fun time. Nite did not appear to end as my mom brought a bottle of desert wine and pieces of cake at around 11pm. LOL But after a binge of good food, alcohol and loads of laughters, we decided to have a rest of the nite. My mom at this point was quite drunk that
she would engage in a conversation/telling a story to Tatsu with no special reason (her tendency whenever she gets super drunk). LOL So it was a little hard to take her away from the room where Tatsu was resting. LOL But we successfully all went to bed by around 1:30am.