Fighting a bush.....

This past weekend I got to experience something that not many foreigners get to experience in Japan. I went out in the mountains with eight other japanese people to look for Mountain Vegetables. After getting up at 4am, we finally got to the mountain around 7am. I thought it might just be a little walk on a nice path just picking them as we walked down it but, wow was I mistaken.

This is me after a couple of the ladies got me dressed up and ready to go. I look huge cause the pants were three sizes to big so I had them rolled up under my jacket and shoved into my boots. The boots we rubber so we could go through water and mud and the had huge grips on the bottom so I wouldn't fall. I had a backpack on my back that they had given me so I could hold all my vegetables. Then I had a baseball cap on and a sort of bandana on over top of it to cover my cheeks. Also in this photo you don't see my gloves but the blue and white gloves kind of finished of the whole outfit. At this point I was glad we were somewhere in the mountain and not many people would see me.


Silly me, I thought this was the nice easy path we would take.


But really looking at this picture you could say there was no path.


When we came to this river I thought 'oh well I guess we better turn around'. But they just hopped in and started walking so the adventure continued. There were definitely more rivers to come throughout the day.


There were like a thousand different kinds of edible plants to remember and I had to keep asking if you could eat this or that. If it looked good to me I thought you could eat it. Everyone was laughing at me. But here are just a couple of things you had to keep your eyes open for. The first one is bamboo this one was to big to pick but they hid in the grass and near trees for the most part. The second one, if you look close at the top of the tree you see some greens on the top of it, that's what we needed, after pushing the tree and three of us working together we finally go them and more to come.



These are all the veggies that three of us picked in about two hours, but I don't really count I was still trying to figure out what's edible at the end of the trip.










































Finally after all my hard work the couple that invited me decided to reward me by showing me how to make tempura and I also got to eat some. So this is what the stuff we picked looks like on the table. It was amazing, it always tastes better when you pick the food yourself!