japan: shirahama

So here’s my crazy tale from Shirahama. On Saturday, Jesse and I planned a day trip to Shirahama mainly for the beach there – apparently, according to Jesse, the white sand on Shirahama beach was imported from Australia, crazy eh! Anyways, the beach was extremely beautiful, and I loved the feeling of the sand. Oh, and there were soooooooooo many people there, but I didn’t mind it. So we swam and laid under the sun for a while, sat on some men-made rocks/cliffs to watch the sunset; and as we were walking through the beach to the bus stop, we saw hundreds of candles lit all throughout the entire beach, it was no doubt a spectacular sight!

Alright, this is where all the craziness starts: so we took the bus back to the train station, expecting to get on a train back to Osaka. However, we have missed the last train, which was at 7:30 pm... like WTF, why so early!?!?!?! The guy who worked at the station gave us a schedule, which was all in Japanese except for one part that said something like "to Osaka... impossible". We had absolutely no idea what to do; we didn’t know where to sleep as we figured that all the hotels were probably beyond expensive since it was a resort town. We started walking back towards the beach (at that point, we were thinking of sleeping on the beach), we passed by a police station and I told Jesse that we should go in and see if the cops knew any cheap places (ie, youth hostels) where we could stay for the night. So we went in, found one cop that spoke some English, explain our situation to him... and to make this long story short, one of the cops called this place up, got us a room and the cop who spoke English drove us to the hotel. Seriously, the polices in Japan are sooooo nice and helpful... there’s no division between cops and ordinary folks like there is in North America... people in Japan respect them and vice-versa. So we got to the hotel, which ended being more like a youth hostel then anything... originally, they were going to charge us around $60 Canadian for a shared room with four beds in it. Of course, we thought that was expensive, so we told the cop that we didn’t really have enough money as we still needed to pay for the train ride back to Osaka the next day. (that was totally a lie... we had more than enough since I didn’t need to buy any train ticket because I had a JR pass) So, the cop bargained with the owner and we each ended up paying five bucks less. The room actually turned out to be pretty great, there were no other people sleeping there, it was big, we got our own bathroom, and we also got a TV. We checked out the next day at around 9:15 am and went to the beach again. It was extremely sunny that day and I got major sunburn. Jesse said that I look like Zoidberg from Futurama. We left the beach at around one and finally took the train back to Osaka. That was my unforgettable adventure at Shirahama, I hoped you enjoy this overly long post. On another note, I have been crazy sick these past few days... I still feel really sick... I am so not looking forward to the long-ass plane ride, but I will be home very soon, so I’ll see you all soon!!!

See all my pictures from Shirahama here.