Hakuba

We headed up to Hakuba for the afternoon. Hakuba Valley is a famous ski destination – it was the site of the 18th Winter Olympic Games and apparently the powder is amazing (I won’t pretend to know what I’m talking about) but we just enjoyed an afternoon of snooping around the fancy chalets and getting a bit of a sense of the place. Hakuba has a unique ambience as there are so many foreigners – it feels like the main language is English and returning home to Ikusaka felt a bit like coming back from another country. We found a couple of nice cafes – Penguin Cafe and Sounds Like Cafe. We really want to explore Oide Park which looks so beautiful but it will have to wait for another day. We will be back to explore more and came back enthused to catch some of the internationalism of Hakuba in our life here and in our project.