Japan Holiday, July 29 (Have You Ever Seen The Rain)

Time to head off to the country side, with the Fuji Rock Festival due to start on Friday - and something of an opening celebration and setup today. And here's where the benefit of having a big and small suitcase FINALLY came through. I anticipated it could be trouble having to take two suitcases on the train and bus and then however far it is to get to the ski resort/hotel where we're staying, so I jammed four days worth of clothes into my small suitcase and dumped the other one at a luggage storage place. The luggage storage was funny, it's outside of Tokyo Station and you have to go down two lifts to get there. When you step out there's about six guys sitting there doing no work, that seem delighted to see somebody.

Before getting on the Shinkansen to Echigo-Yuzawa there was time to look around the Tokyo basement shops. To my surprise there's a heap of great shops down here and each of the TV networks have a merchandise store too, brilliant! One of those stores even had a Hana Yori Dango poster on the wall, but sadly no other merchandise from the show. Most of them were selling merchandise related to animated shows, and somehow three different stores were selling One Piece - surely just one network has the rights to it.

From Yuzawa we got on a bus to Mt. Naeba where the festival is. The bus took about a half hour but mostly because the roads have to snake up and down the mountain side. It's quite a different scenario having gone from Tokyo to a town with one main street and a few hotels. By the time we arrived at the drop-off point not only had it started raining but it was bucketing down. We didn't know exactly where the hotel was either, so we're just running in the rain in the direction where most of the hotels seem to be, getting wetter by the minute. Luckily we found a place to take shelter while Kris went off with the only umbrella we collectively had to try and find the place. The good news was we had been going in the right direction, but still had a way to go. So off into the rain again, running with a suitcase (so glad I didn't have two at this point) and looking forward to getting out of this weather.

We all made it, without too much water damage, and had a chance to dry off. The rain had settled down, so we went back out to the main street to look for some umbrellas and wet weather gear, and to get our wristbands for the festival. We hadn't been out for more than five minutes when the rain started pouring again, I'm running through the rain and my eyes are pretty much stinging from all the water hitting my face. By the time we got to the general store I was soaked, but just happy to be out of the rain again. We loaded up on some plastic poncho things and I even bought an umbrella - I don't think I've ever owned or used one up until this day. Surprisingly they hadn't jacked up the prices either.

The massive Prince Hotel.

The not-so-massive main street.

As you can clearly see in this photo, I was the *only* person who didn't come prepared.

Using my fancy new umbrella (what an invention!) we headed down to the festival entrance and got the wristbands. I'd had enough of the rain though, so didn't stick around to see if there was any other activities going on (opening night fireworks were cancelled of course). However I've already realised I'm totally unequipped for the festival in the following ways (and more are set to follow):

• No umbrella
• No wet weather gear
• No water-friendly shoes