On Saturday, some of my friends heard of a cherry blossom festival in a small town nearby. We took the subway to a bus station and then rode for about an hour to the festival town. It was a little bit ironic to go to a cherry blossom festival when the blossoms were not yet at full bloom. I'm pretty sure that the trees outside my apartment had fuller blossoms than in this town we visited. Had we waited a week, the blossoms would have been much better, but there would have also have been tons more people. It was pretty crowded as it was, so I'm glad we went when we did. While the cherry blossoms weren't very spectacular, there was a huge market set up in the streets of the city. We wandered around for 2-3 hours and people shopped. They had everything you could imagine in the market. There were nice antiques, swords, cheap junk stuff you would find in a dollar store, textiles, sunglasses, clothes, and countless food vendors selling almost every food imaginable.
There was also a mountain with a tower on top that you could climb and get a pretty amazing view of the area. There was a funicular going to the top, but we took the stairs. I'm not sure how many steps it was, but I remember when we were about 1/5th of the way up seeing 150 and it is 152 steps up to my 9th floor apartment. Basically, there were a lot of steps. Three of my friends raced up. None of them made it to the top still running, but they did all make it very tired. After getting to the top and resting for a while, we climbed to the top of the tower, which was around 6-7 levels of balconies, I think. We couldn't go all the way up because the top was closed, but even from where we were the view was spectacular. I'm sure the only thing that could have made it better would have been more prevalent cherry blossoms. A view from high up of the sea, a town, islands, and mountains on a beautiful clear day is pretty amazing.
