A newspaper was deposited outside our hotel room door each morning.  All the news was about the G20 Summit taking place in Osaka just as I would be transiting through on my way to Koyasan.

“You might want to ask if there will be train disruptions,” Lynn suggested.  “Security will be massive since Trump will be there.”

I hadn’t heard that name for a couple weeks and now we would be in the same city, if briefly. Why couldn’t he stay in Washington and eat hamburgers?

At the station, the JR information people had no idea what the G20 Summit was, much less whether it would affect my itinerary.

“Well I tried,” I shrugged as we walked on to find breakfast.

“Oh, oh, let’s try here!” I enthused as we passed a vending machine restaurant.  “It’s on my list of quirky Japanese things to try.”

Vending machine restaurants are restaurants with vending machines at the entrance.  You pick out your meal and pay for it, get a ticket, then are seated at a table to await your order.  The idea is to streamline the order process, I guess.  They eliminate jobs for real people in the restaurant but must create jobs for coders in Tokyo.

There were three machines.  Lynn and I stood before them in some consternation, pressing buttons, feeding in coins, and collecting meal tickets while one after another, Japanese customers came and went at the third machine.

“I just want the standard Japanese brekky with smoked salmon, miso, and that rice and nori thing,” I said.  “There’s a picture of it but 530 yen?  That seems too cheap.”

“I just ordered five breakfasts … or none,” Lynn said.  “I really do not want a raw egg!”

So we each received a raw egg and slimy beans.

I took a close up so you can see the strings of slime in case you’ve never seen slimy bean strings.

Lynn flagged down the server, whose job was to deliver trays from the kitchen and collect tickets.

“Excuse me,” she said as she held up the plate with her raw egg, “could I have this cooked?”

“No,” he said, and walked away.

“Well that was clear,” Lynn said.

Slimy beans are very nutritious, so I mixed mine with rice and miso, doused it all with soy sauce, and cleaned my plate.

—

Today we would need a good breakfast because we were hiking Mount Wakakusa.  “I really want to see the Kasu … gaya…ga…yama Primeval Forest.  Let’s hope we can just point to the name on the map and won’t have to pronounce it,” I said as we headed into the Information Office.  The green squiggly line on the map indicates the road to the top of the mountain, and no pedestrians are allowed on it.

It was recommended to us that we take a taxi to the top then walk down “the back way.”  This felt wimpy to me but once we were in the taxi it became clear we could never have walked up.  The narrow road really did squiggle, and at a very steep incline.  It would have taken hours to walk.

We enjoyed the views of the city and surrounding countryside from the mountaintop, then proceeded to walk down.

Thousands of uneven stone steps were interspersed with grassy slopes.  There was a kiosk, literally in the middle of nowhere, from which a man sold hiking passes.

“Once again, I will just say that I’m glad to be doing this while my knees are still good,” I tossed back to Lynn.

At the bottom there was a small kiosk staffed by a friendly woman who sold passes to hikers going up the way we’d come down.

I wondered at this sign.

What would it take for the mountaintop to not be available?

“Thank you for resisting the urge to roll down the slope,” Lynn said as she pointed to the list of don’ts.

We asked directions to Kauga Taisha Shrine which was supposedly nearby, but never found it.

It was lunchtime anyway.  We found the one restaurant I had on my list, and a good thing, too, because it was closing the next day for a year of renovation.