Kurobe Dam - Day 1

Okay...it's taken me a while to post *this* one! I was just browsing through my DRAFTS....and it's been here for yonks...so just a quick summary of the photos that we took when we went on the Lab Field trip to Kurobe Dam 黒部ダム which I think was some time back in September...but i'm a bit hazy about it all now...Greg was definitely on his One Month 'Holiday' in Japan at the time....and it was still damned hot an humid in Japan...

We'd left from outside our Department quite early in the morning, and sat on the bus for the majority of the day...making the odd stop at service stations...we eventually got to our Ryokan 旅館 in the early afternoon, we off loaded and got our rooms sorted...

In the only girls room we found a lovely grasshopper thing...which everyone stared at for a good few minutes, before I deftly swept it out of the window (mainly because nobody else, including the boys who wondered into the room wondering what the squealing was about, would touch it...)

It was quite large...honest...

After pissing about in our rooms for a bit, we all decided to have a little walk around the Ryokan, to see what the area was like....it was very peaceful...majestic mountains and quite a large river flowing by...


What looked like a nice little 'beach' on the side of the river....the mass of metal is some sculpture type thing which makes up a view point along the river...we crossed a nice bridge to get to it...

A close up of the view point...

View down stream....from said view point.

On our wanders around town we came across a free foot spa...

...Greg soon realised that he was hanging out with a lot of engineering geeks, we'd stop and take photos of very weird things... usually walls holding back soil...and every bridge that we came across...on the other hand we just found it strange that he was taking pictures of 'scenery'.....

yay! more bridge....

mmmm......concreeeeteeeeee, aren't abutments exciting?

Anyway, we did eventually drag ourselves away from the dam (much to some peoples dissappointment - they'd wanted to go have a better look at the dam...) and head back to the ryokan for a big dinner with all the students and professors... some people proceeded to get very, very drunk on sake....several ppl were later found rather inebriated lying beside the foot spa in town...