Rainy days and museums

by Cyril · 2024-08-13

It’s raining today. The reason might be the taifun no 3 that is coming up the east coast of Japan and trying to give us a bit of a scare. It started to upgrade from drizzle to rain at half past 11 last night. And now the question is what to do?
The official programme calls for a visit to the ski jump as the only item on the itinerary. So why not do something different and travel out for an hour to a historic village. In Kaitaku they reassembled old buildings from all over Hokaido and added some information to it.

Of course, as this is a village in itself with multiple areas, shelter from the rain is limited. But at the moment it is just a drizzle again. Putting on my rain jacket would have me probably wet faster than the warm spray. And they do have umbrellas to use on the site at the entrance.
And they did have a (good) translation of their brochure in my mother tongue as well. Not just the regular limited English one you see at a lot of places.

If looking at old buildings that have been transplanted to a museum is your thing, you have to decide for yourself. I thought that the mix of having just the buildings and some pictures and explanations inside the bigger buildings was done quite well. Where else would I be able to see real silk worms in an old silk worm factory? Or a nice lady working hard trying to explain to me in English how she is making clothes from rice straw. Things like snow boots and raincoats. Or even the hat I was able to try on.
The invitation to build my own little straw item I declined though.

Now the rain was coming down somewhat stronger. And I started to get wet. But not wet enough for me to go all the way back to the entrance to get an umbrella. The wonder of warm rain. At another station, there was a quite modern farmhouse where you could try your hand on milking an artificial cow. After reading the instructions, it was not that hard.
The gent who manned this station did not speak as much English as the lady did. But when I was about to leave, he vanished for a few minutes and came back with an umbrella for me to use.
Yay.

While I continued my visit to the lumberjacks hut the rain worsened. I was very happy to have the umbrella now. The guys from the museum changed their attire to full rain gear as well. After some time in the rain, my lens decided to fog up, which made the pictures a lot less crisp.

The trip ended with me having a short chat with a guy in the rebuilt police station and then taking the bus back to the city.
The meeting point at the beer garden was empty (well too early, too much alcohol and it was raining), so my next stop was back at the hotel.