Japan Trip 2012, Day 1 - Yuigahama Beach

Next day, was the beach. We'd picked out one beforehand, Yuigahama, which had opened... I think the day before we got there. We took a train to Yuigahama Station, and chose to walk the rest of the way instead of taking the local train down. It was around a half-hour, maybe fourty minutes, to get there with only a vague idea of where to go. The return trip was likely around twenty minutes.

Yes, that's the Thai flag flying on the beach at a food place. We didn't end up going, but they were called Little Bangkok... I think. I don't know for sure if they served Thai food (they probably did), but the Singha logo was everywhere there, so they probably served that.

The beach at Yuigahama has apparently been used as the model for a couple of anime settings as well, which I think was part of the reason it was chosen by us. You can see some comparison pics here with my coincidental shot of something close to one of the scenes from a different angle.

Ika Musume: http://d.hatena.ne.jp/riyot/20101121/1290323507
Uta Kata: http://tsurebashi.blog123.fc2.com/blog-category-13.html

I had to buy a pair of swim trunks just for this, and a pair of googles, but I had a good chunk of fun for a while. After rolling around in the sea, I started rolling around in the sand, and was only roused from my crabby ways by a frisbee that people started tossing around.

Once the frisbee lost its appeal, we had stuff to eat at a little hut on the beach. I had some Kara-age since I love the stuff, but after realizing that beach food usually consists of Yakisoba, I decided to down some of that as well.

One of my friends then decided he'd go around town and find a watermelon we could smash. He was out for quite a while, but came back with one and a flimsy piece of wood he swiped from a construction site that would probably have broken if it hit the watermelon. So, we asked around instead. One staff member in a neighboring hut was kinda enough to give us a thick beam of wood - the dimensions were probably in the vicinity of 4 inches both wide and thick, and 5 feet tall. Unweildy and nothing like a good baseball bat, but for our purposes it would serve.

It took four people (which was actually all of us at the time) to blindly swing at the ground before the watermelon felt our collective wrath, but the watermelon proved unable to avoid our wild Hulk Smashing, and shattered in the end. Thus satisfied with our entire trip, we picked up pieces of watermelon, filled the remainder of our bellies with them, tossed what we couldn't eat (mainly shell) in a trash can, then left to go back to Tokyo.