#77 Exploring Sayama Lake, Saitama

Transcript

Alright, this is a two-part episode, and this is part two, so I'll catch you up in case you didn't hear last episode. And honestly, I mean, every episode of this podcast is just me wandering around, just soaking in whatever happens to happen. So you can easily jump in here, no problem. But it's just I was walking around the area near Hyjama Station and just heading a bit east of there, and then I noticed on the map. I noticed on the map that there's this big crazy lake. So this is just my adventure of trying to get to the lake. So let's pick up from last episode. I was walking east from Hyjama Station along a little wee river, and I saw an Aon Mall coming up ahead of me, and it's like, oh yeah, I've been to that mall before. Hmm, maybe I should go back to the mall. So let's go.

Man, I've just been walking down this little river, and I'm just thinking like, ah, this is nice. It's nice, kind of, to not go on an adventure. My adventures have been a little severely all these giant hills and mountains and crazy shit going on, and ravines and gulches and death-defying terror. It's nice to just walk, just to walk down next to this river, just to go nowhere for no reason, just to soak in just the city, just walk through the city.

And I know that it's January 1st, it's finally starting to feel a little bit like fall. It's like, like, oh yeah, it's a little windy. Just the tiniest chill in the air. All these sleeveless trees as I walk, and even though I just said like, I'm not just going to go to the mall, I went to Bosch, Bosch and Scrimshaw. I'm not that fucking lame. Well, I am that fucking lame, because I just, you know, I did find a washroom here, and I'm like, yeah, of course, good old Japan, a washroom. But it was a rare washroom that didn't have any toilet paper, so, of course, I peed. That was fine. But I'm like, yeah, you know, I mean, the mall is coming up here. I don't especially need the washroom, but I don't not need the washroom. So, yeah, fuck it. Maybe I will go to the mall, and then the beauty of having Google Maps on my phone. I'm like, so is there anything up by the mall? What if I go up to the mall? The A on mall, and I was like, hmm, Noya Metaka, Roku Doyama Park is up there. And it's just amazing how you can miss these things, because when I went to that mall back in 2019, I actually approached it from from the west. I was up there. I walked along, and it just seemed to be highways and city. It was kind of unpleasant. You know, that's why I saw the mall at the time. It was like, let me just go to the mall. But not far from the mall is this park. It doesn't look too bad. Like, geez, I walked right. Like, I had no idea. I didn't know that was there. And then I scrolled a little further. Sayama Lake. This big ass fucking lake is right here. What the fuck is this? Totoro's Forest number one. Saitama Green Forest Museum. What is all this shit?

Roku Doyama Park Observatory. So, all of a sudden, new plan. And still, just a nice casual walk up to the mall and then just keep walking plan. Not a trapeze active death plan. But yeah, I mean, it's been nice to walk along this little river, but I followed it really far on the map just to see if a name would pop up. And no name ever popped up. But it really goes a long distance until it eventually just kind of disappears somewhere. So it's like, yeah, you know, this has been nice, but it seems unlikely that that particular journey was going anywhere specific. So, a new plan. New plan to go see what this, it's just a lake. What do you mean a lake? How is there a lake in Tokyo? Just chilling. So, I'm going to go there.

All right, this is a bit confusing. I'm not quite sure the topography of this area is weird. I'm in a tunnel right now. So, the mall was a shit show. Holy fuck. January 1st, man. I guess after you hike up Mount Takawa and watch the sunrise, the next thing you do is to come to the mall. It was uncomfortable. There were so many people in there. Like, holy shit. So, I'd be lined through that bad boy. And the scale of things around here, it's a little, I guess it's harder to tell at a glance on the map because there's just fewer things out here. There's less stuff on the map. So, things are a little further than I thought they 5:00 were. It took a lot longer to get to the mall than I expected. But now that I'm heading toward this lake, I don't know. I can't tell. I'm like, is this actually much, much larger than I thought it was? Is the distance much, much further than I thought it was? It's like 3.48. I've only got like a good solid hour left before it starts to get dark. So, I don't know what's going to happen here. But this tunnel, I'm in Naruto Nakato Park.

Hmm. And yeah, I think this tunnel's not going to quite take me where I want to go. Wait, that one coming out of the tunnel. See if my blue dot returns. Where am I? Because there's two lakes around here. There's Siyama Lake and Toma Lake. I guess I'm going to try to get to Siyama. I don't know. Because they're just big black death splotches on my dark mode map.

Okay, I guess if I go through the next tunnel, then I think I can escape and get out of here. And just visually, I'm like, I don't think that any mountains around here are too crazy big, but it seems that these are just lakes on a mountain. And you know, there's just nothing around them.

There's a park. Say, I'm a nature park on the far end of the lake, if I can get there. I guess I just don't know. In another tunnel, I don't know what's going to happen here. I don't quite know how to progress. I don't know how to proceed. I don't know what the heck's going on here.

But I think I'll make it in time. And there is a subway station not too far from up there. So, I mean, just given that that there's a subway station. And then on the other side of these lakes is a bunch more city. It seems like it's all probably pretty developed.

But yeah, certainly, this is very odd. This whole thing is very odd. I do wish I had hit upon this plan a little earlier, but obviously this just came out of nowhere. But yeah, I'm racing the sun, I guess. My nice casual walk. What a nice day to go do nothing. It's turned into a mission.

But roughly speaking, I think I'm going to make it in time and at least try to figure out like what the heck's going on here. What's up with these lakes, dude? I had no idea about these.

Okay, through the tunnel. Now another tunnel. Okay, presumably on the other end of this tunnel, I can go north. At some point I got to go north. I got to stop going east, but I seem to have limited options. Hey, there's a spider. Jorrow spider. I haven't seen one of you guys in a while. It's a little cold. A little cold for spiders. Good luck there, son. All right, tunnel number three. So anyway, I'm just going to try to meander my way to one of these two lakes and see what happens. They really are very scary looking on the map, because these lakes are not at all round. They're very jagged. They look like the font that like slam metal bands use for their logos. You know, bands that have vocals like that, the gurgly fucking pig vocals. But okay, wish me luck.

All right, listen to this. This is some lucky ASMR.

That's big ass gate ASMR. Thank fucking God. So I went up this little narrow driveway. They led to an apartment building against the side of this hill, and it's kind of neat, just like there's the apartment building. I could see somebody doing like sewing in one of the rooms. And there was a car park there. Really cool red car where it's like, oh, this was a grand theft auto game. You know, that'd be a really good car, just the way it's like specifically there ready for you. You can grab it and go down the mountain. But then that driveway ended at that apartment building, but luckily there was a path that kept going up through the fucking woods and I'm like, okay, good, good. I'll take that. But then at the end of the path, it got way overgrown. Like, it wasn't that hard to walk through. You can still see the path, but you could tell no one had walked through there in a long time, because it was, you know, I'm like pushing through the foliage. 10:00 And then I got to this huge fence with triple layers of barbed wire at the top, and there's a road and a sidewalk on the other side and a person jogging by, but I'm on the other side of the fucking barbed wire fence. And I'm like, what am I supposed to do? I have to get over there. I mean, I don't. Probably I would have just gone back down because I don't think, I mean, I say a big fence. It's, I'm taller than this fence. It was like a five foot fence. But then with the three layers of barbed wire, if it wasn't for the barbed wire, I could get across the fence. But I mean, Jesus. Like, what the fuck? But luckily, there was that that gate right there that was not locked, just opened it and went through. And I'm like, Jesus, that was lucky. I almost had a tail of me slicing my fucking hand open on trying to climb a fence. Like, no, I think I would have just gone back down, but it sure would have been a bummer. What a weird area. Like, there's, what is going on around here? Now I'm going up these little steps that are on the other side of this road. See, I'm like, what is this road? Hmm. Yeah, I think this road doesn't take me where I want to go. Fuji Tana Open Space is near here. Whatever the fuck that is. But there's a little dotted line. So perhaps I can cut through these woods. There is a path here, but again, it's real fucking shitty. No one Jews this path in a long time. Tons of fallen branches and trees across this thing.

But it looks like I can cut through here. However, I'm still not really at the lake. I don't know that there is a way to get to the lake. Maybe I've just got to walk along the road all the way until I get to one of the proper parks at the east side of the lake. I don't know that the lake itself is particularly accessible. Oh man, and yeah, this path is quickly disappearing as well. Is this really going to work? What? What? No, this is not going to work. All right, I'm going to go back to the road. I just go west around that way. It's not that far. It'll be fine. What are these little dotted trails on Google Maps that are nothing? It'd be better if there was nothing there. Why are you getting my hopes up about these trails that don't exist? This one is also a brown trail.

I should look up what that means. The green ones seem a lot more like they exist. The brown ones, I don't know what these are supposed to be, but two days in a row, I've been to a brown trail that is not really there. Anyway, the weird adventure continues. Continue to wish me luck. But yeah, I think God there was that door on the gate. What the heck? That was, that was working a weird.

Alright, well, I suspect this might be the end of the adventure for today. Pardon the traffic. I'll try not to talk over too much. I'll try to let the cars go by. But there's a fair amount of traffic, and I am trapped. There is no escape. This is like a narrow corridor, I mean. It feels more like a video game than anything has ever felt in Japan. So basically, there was some kind of little path on the other side. It was a very short little thing with the brown dot trail that I couldn't find. It was really no big deal, whether I found it or not. But on the other side, there was the exit to a trail that I couldn't find the start of. So I guess that's what the brown dots mean. The brown dots on Google Maps, they're like, they're the brown dashes. They're like the ghost of a trail. It's like there was a trail here at some point in history. But exactly where it is and whether or not it still exists. It cannot be guaranteed. So I think it's safe to say not to make any plans based on the brown dashes. If it happens to work out great, but it does seem like that means it's just a vague memory of a trail that once was.

And even though I was not able to get to the lake, this does explain the story of the lake. The weird, scary shape of it on the map. It is hard to describe, but it really does look just looks ominous. It does not look like other lakes look. That's kind of explained now because there's fencing with the aforementioned barbed wire all along the edge of the lake. It's an extremely wild, undeveloped forest in woods on the other side. And I can't actually see the lake, but it's down there somewhere. All along this southern edge of Lake Sayama, there is no approaching it. And I suspect it's the same on every other side except on the eastern side where Sayama Nature Park is, which maybe I'll get there. 15:00 I don't think so. I think by the time I get there, it's going to be dark. What will I be able to see in the dark? I don't know. But it's quite a ways. I have quite a ways to go. I'm not even halfway. And I'm actually approaching Tamalake is south of here on the other side. So I'm passing in between the two lakes. So it's basically I got to my left. I've got fence with barbed wire. I've got this sidewalk that I'm on. I've got a guard barrier. I got two lanes of highway that have stripes on them whenever there's a turn or something. And they have orange like very narrow pylons in the middle to keep everybody in their lane.

Then another highway barrier and another walkway on the other side with fence and barbed wire. So it's this really narrow two lane road winding between these two lakes. And yeah, just because it's so narrow, it just it feels like not only like a video game level, but an old school video game level. When there wasn't as much processing power and there wasn't as much RAM when you couldn't have a wide open level, all you could have was a narrow band. You could only have this one little street and you had to block everything off. And on the edges, you could have, you know, trees and stuff you could suggest to forest and you could claim there was a lake nearby. But because of the lack of processing power, you wouldn't want to show all that stuff. And that's what it feels like. I'm just trapped in this little narrow corridor. It's like being indoors when you're outdoors. Maybe even a slightly more modern example is Far Cry 2 was like this. It was an open world game before they really had the capabilities to do a proper open world. So even though you're supposed to be in the African savanna in Far Cry 2, realistically, it's like a series of corridors. It's a series of discrete areas. Like you can feel when you're going from one zone to the next and like, oh, now I'm in a canyon or now I'm stuck here and I'm stuck there. It's like a series of rooms kind of really big rooms, but it's certainly not a big outdoor world. It's like a very clever way to set that up. Anyway, that's what this feels like. And a couple of joggers have gone by, a handful of cyclists and there is a guy walking just as I started saying that on the other side, coming the other way. So it's not that nobody comes here, but clearly not a ton of people do and definitely no one ever cleans this place up. Because there's random garbage strewn about that literally maybe people just threw out of the windows of their cars. This would be a good jogging route. You're not going to run into a lot of other people. Oh, there's another person on the other side of me. I guess that's the thing. Clearly the other side is the slightly better walking path. If you are going to lock this path, you go on the other side of the road. So I'm on the side that really doesn't get used. And as extreme evidence of that, this is the side of the road time forgot. There was a VHS tape amongst the discarded debris. So how fucking long has that been there? And it's always exciting to find a VHS tape and see what's written on it. Like, what is this? Murder, she wrote. New heart. What do we got on here? It's season one of the ex files, but all the writing was in Japanese. So I don't know, unfortunately. I can't tell you what was on the discarded VHS tape.

So this is pretty interesting. And I mean, this is neat to know this is here. And I hope. I mean, it's like 4.30 now. If there's ever a place where there's not going to be a fucking five o'clock jingle. This is the one. If a jingle starts playing, I'm going to fucking... I don't even know what. I'm going to rub my dick on this barbed wire. There's no fucking way. The one place in the entirety of Tokyo where I can't hear a siren, you know. Because there's a lot of traffic. I'm constantly stopping to let traffic go by. The raw recording of this section is three times longer than what you're hearing. And quite a few pedestrians actually. I mean, there's quite a number of joggers and some walkers and bikers going by. But geographically, man, this is isolated between the two lakes. Super rugged terrain. Forgotten VHS tapes. Which we can only guess what was on them.

Oh no, what the hell is this? So I was just going to try to keep B lighting it and just like fast as possible. Try to get to this park, try to check out this park, figure out what's going on. Just so I don't have to come back later. 20:00 I would like to wrap up this adventure today and not to have to come back later just to see what's going on.

But there's a path now. Damn it. Okay, just cross the road. There's a path and a little shrine on the map. Tamako Shrine, T-A-M-A-K-O.

Because this is just getting to one of the scary fingers of Tamalake. Can I get down to the lake from here? I have to try.

There's a pretty distinct path going right down to the lake. Actually, I guess I'm coming up on a bridge that crosses it too. If I just had an extra hour today, it would make a lot of difference.

Oh man, yeah, this is like a rugged-ass trail from hell going down toward. There's another fence down there. It's getting dark and spooky. I ain't doing it. It's getting way too late in the day, way too close to darkness. I got to stay to the main routes today. Okay, back to the original plan.

At this rate, I believe I should be able to make it to and across Sayama Nature Park, while it's still light enough for me to tell what the fuck's going on.

And there's some train stations north of the park, but they're pretty far. But there's one bicycle around the park. There's one not too far. Seibu Kyojo, my station. All right, here's another path that probably goes to that shrine, but whatever. I ain't here for shrines. I'm here for a lake. Gotta get moving.

Okay, actually, here is the shrine. The shrine is right by the road. So I guess I can pass by the shrine after all.

And if there is a way down to Lake Tama, I don't see it. The trees are quite thick. I have to talk about it in a band and shrine. Just like everything else around here.

I mean, not a band and definitely somebody's been by to sweep up the leaves to some degree. But there's not much going on here. And yeah, the shrine itself just has a gate. And you can't actually properly get in. It's very small.

Geez.

It's kind of neat looking though. There's coins in there.

It's kind of cool looking. It's just littered with mostly one-yenne coins and some fives. But this clearly has not been opened in a long time. It's basically abandoned. And there's tons of coins in there.

If you ever needed evidence that one-yenne coins, you don't need these fucking things anymore. How about this shrine?

It is just like a pile of one-yenne coins completely abandoned and forgotten about. Because no one gives a fuck.

So yeah, I can't see Tama River, but I did just catch a view. There's a break in the trees and I can see the other lake. I can see a little bit through there too. It's pretty big.

It is the bigger of the two.

Yeah, and I guess I'm very near one of the scary fingers of Sayama Lake. Sayama is way bigger than Tama. Well, I guess Tama Lake is actually pretty long. I suppose they're probably actually about the same for overall size.

But yeah, it looks very big from what I can see through the trees. I don't know where that gonging is coming from. Is it just from the wind? I have no idea. But yeah, I'm getting pretty close to the, I think this is all working out. I'm getting pretty close to the park. It's still daylight. As long as I can just get that nice view of the lake while the sun's still up. That's all I'm looking for. That'll do. That will do pig.

All right, I made it just in time. And yeah, the lake itself is not nearly as frightening. Once you can see it, it seems a lot scarier from the edges when it's all just the jagged terrain and barbed wire. Though this is the land of fences. This whole park is very fence-dough. There's like a couple of walkways. You can walk out into the lake. And there's little buildings out there so you can get like a cooler view of the lake. But it's all fence-dough. I have no idea how you're supposed to get in there. Maybe it's a summertime thing. But then yeah, once you finally get to the middle, at least the barbed wire goes away. There's fences that you can easily hop. And they just say, little signs like, please don't. Please don't. 25:00 And yeah, it's okay. It's nice, you know. Got the lake. Got that little weird building in the lake. I really just barely made it in time. What time is it here? Because like, yeah, the sun, you can only just see it peaking over the woods in the distance. 4.52 p.m., and you can see a bunch of mountains in the deep distance. It's not bad. It's okay. Then behind the lake on the other side, you can look down and see a bunch of city. But yeah, I'm glad I got here in time to determine for sure. Because this would be really dark at night. I don't know if you'd be able to see anything. Really? I don't see any lights around here.

I got here early enough to determine that this is fine. This is fine. I don't need to come back and explore this more. It's kind of neat that it's here, but it's a bit plain once you're actually here. This one, you know, like I said yesterday, that little nature walk along the Timor River. I'm like, oh, this is cool. This might be worth coming to. Not this one. Nah. Maybe if you somehow are at an Airbnb that's like next door and you can just swing by, then sure. Why not? But don't go out of your way. This was an interesting discovery. I had no freaking idea this is here. But it's, I mean, it's a pretty big lake. It's kind of cool. I don't know. It's weird to, it's weird to review anything. Because kind of like, who cares? Who cares what anybody thinks about a TV show or a movie? But it's extra weird, I guess, to review nature. Hey, is that Mount Fuji? That's kind of neat, I suppose. If you're at the right angle, that certainly looks like Mount Fuji. So I guess you can see a little teeny touch of Mount Fuji just peeking over the top of the trees. So as is often the case, the journey is far better than the destination. Yes, suppose even just as lakes go, the lake I was at earlier. Lake Sagami Park, for example. I believe this lake is bigger, but that one was just neater. There's stuff going on there. There's things in the surrounding area. This one is like weird, there's just like nothing. There's nothing around it. It's really just like no frills. It's a no frills lake. That's what this is. So yeah, I was going to continue on through this park and then either go to one of the stations up north or try to circle back around. But yeah, again, it's just, it's so no frills. It's so, there's just nothing much to see here. I'm just going to go straight back. I'm just going to go back to the nearest station. Which, what might that be? Seibu Kyojo Mai Station. Seems like it's not that tough to get to from here. That will be my plan. But another thing I saw on the way here is there was this great big domed building on the way into this park. And I was like, what the heck is this? Oh, some lights just turned on. Sneaky, there is some lights. They're built into the posts of this fence. That's pretty cool.

You know, as it gets darker, it's actually starting to look kind of neater as it gets darker. I feel bad that I was shitting on it. You're okay. Like, you're not so bad.

But yeah, I saw this huge dome. I had to kind of skirt across the street real quick. I was like, I know I'm on a time crunch, but what is that? I just need to know what that is. And looking at it, I could not tell. But luckily, my little Google map did tell me and it's indoor skiing. And I was like, what the fuck? Like, oh, yeah, I guess I knew that was a thing. I guess I was aware of indoor skiing. But like, what the hell?

I got to look that up and just see like, how does that work? What is indoor skiing even like? No wonder it's such a huge building. Like, that must be quite an endeavor.

And yeah, in the opposite direction of the lake is a Ferris wheel. And it's not Tokyo summer, whatever. The one in Akiruno, because that's the other way. It's not Disney, because Disney is very far from here. I don't know what it is.

But oh well, whatever, not every mystery needs to be solved. Somewhere out there is a Ferris wheel for some reason. Presumably, park-related activities.

All right, well, that was an unusual little adventure. Turns out there's a big freaking lake. There's a pair of them. A pair of big freaking lakes, just chilling in Tokyo. I had no idea about that. Now I do. Education has been achieved.

Man, being outside of the city center definitely suits me, because it's a little tricky, it's a little tricky to get home, so that station I went to, there was like a whole like carnival 30:00 type deal, it was like that street fare in Fukuoka, very similar vibe, next to the indoor skiing, there's a bunch of stuff going on there, and that train only went two stops from there, and basically I just didn't know how to get home, and if I had, there was no Wi-Fi connection at any of the stations, and if I had proper internet, you know, I'm sure I could just key it in and figure out what I'm actually supposed to do, so I had to wing it, but I was thinking how, man, I've had some times in the subways in Tokyo that were just miserable, like I was really getting angry and just hating my life, that happened multiple times, and it's just weird that the above ground trains outside of the center, I don't feel that way, because basically after those two stops, whatever station I was at then, I'm like, oh, let's see, what, what is the end of the line for these couple lines that are available, and like one of them was way up north, northwest, and it's like, maybe, probably not though, I think I might have gotten one more station from there, I changed trains like four times, but then I found a line that was going to E.K. Bukuro, and it's like, that's not going to quite work, because what I want to do is try to intersect at some point with the two-o line, the one that runs through Tachikawa, because that goes straight to Hajima, and E.K. Bukuro is not high enough up, it's too far north, so that line was never going to connect, so then I found a line, you know, in another stop or two, hop off at the next transfer station, and then I was at a pretty large one at that point, with more options, and it had a line going to Shinjuku, so I hopped on that one, and in all of these cases it's just fun to watch the blue dots, since I'm above ground, I can watch the blue dot, and in all of them I'm getting a little further south, and a little further south, but I'm also going east, which is away from where I want to go, but it's fine, once I connect up to the two-o line, who gives a shit, you know, and worst case scenario, I could go to E.K. Bukuro, I could go to Shibuya, I could connect up to the two-o line there and come all the way back, but I mean that's like a 30 kilometer each way, extra trips, that would be pretty silly, or I could just get off the train and walk, so basically I hit kind of the happy middle, I hit this and this train that was going towards Shinjuku, it kept going south until it curved, so it's basically going straight across, it's not really curving anymore, and I'm like alright this is as close as I'm gonna get, and I'm not that far, it's probably gonna take me like 20 minutes to walk to the two-o line, I'm a little bit east of Tachikawa, not too bad, and I got off the train and it's getting really cold, I ducked into a little alleyway and I've got my thermal shirt, it's just that awkward transition period right, I got to take off my jacket and take off my little hoodie to put on the thermal shirt, then put all the layers back on, so that was mildly unpleasant, but I got it all on now, I'm all packed up, and now I'm in some weird neighborhood, I'm like where the fuck is this, I've never been here before, and I'm just walking down to the train, and it's just exciting and fun, even with no ability to really know what I'm doing, and basically being lost, but just watching the blue dot and piecing it together, and it's not that bad, and I'm just surprised, because if this same thing happened in the Tokyo subway system, being underground and having no idea where anything is, and it just makes me so agitated and unhappy, we're out here, it's like fun dude, like I started today with like Jesus, I was up on that snoring guy, I'm exhausted, but I feel fucking fine, it's like fun, it's a fun adventure, man, I really like West Tokyo, man, I like it a lot,

so I learned some things yesterday, about yesterday's journey to the no frills lake, Lake Tama and Lake Sayama, and it turns out they really are, I mean similar I guess, to the other lake that I found where it was man-made, you know, it was filled in by a dam, this one is like a reservoir that was basically kind of hand dug, it was made in like 1927, basically both these lakes were made to just be water reservoir because Tokyo was needing more and more water, and back in 1927 they didn't really have proper equipment and stuff, it was just just locals with like hose and things, and literally just dug up this whole thing, 35:00 which is crazy, because it is very very fucking big, but that explains why it's all fenced off, and you can't get anywhere near it, and you know, it's a water reservoir, you're not supposed to go mess with it, and also why it is kind of plain, because it's just, it's just for water, but that's kind of neat to know, and explains why there's these big ass lakes in the middle of Tokyo, but also what's interesting is I was looking it up, is only one of them is in Tokyo, Lake Siyama technically is in Saitama, so I've been to Saitama now, just barely, I fucking walked there, it's so interesting because I always thought of Saitama as on the other side of the Arakawa, but by that point in the layout of the area, the Arakawa has taken a bend to go north south, so the dividing line to Saitama is still there, but it's not bordered by the river anymore, so yeah, the road I was walking down between those two lakes is the border basically, and then I went just a little ways up into Saitama, so that's kind of cool, technically, technically I've been to Saitama, and then on the way home, just the random ass stations I was taking in the different routes that I was cobbling together to get back home, I walked by this place that was closed because it was night, but it seemed cool, and I looked it up, and it does seem cool, I don't know that I'll go back and check it out specifically, but it seems cool enough that I want to point it out, because I think it might be good, even though I'm not generally like a museum guy, there are certain times and certain kinds of museums, like very practical museums, I do like, it's like the modern art type museums I especially don't like, so I liked that museum in Chiba, especially the floor that had like the old style apartment, here's the 1970s apartment, and here's the 1930s apartment, and this place is kind of just that writ large, it's called the Ido Tokyo Openair Architectural Museum, and it's only like four dollars, and it's like an open-air museum in the sense that you go in, and it's just a bunch of recreations, or what they have remaining, of old buildings, really ancient buildings, and you just can walk around and walk into the buildings and walk through the area, and just soak it in, soak in the whole vibe, even just as I'm saying it, I'm like, this actually does sound really fucking cool, I think actually I might try to go back there, that sounds worse than four dollars, and I just happened to walk by it by accident, and just even at night walking by, I'm like, I bet that's cool, and then when I looked into it, it seemed very cool.

Hey yo, Keith from the present, wow, it is really echoing here, I'm just in my little, you know, the wet room, the combination bathroom shower room, you know, the whole room is a shower, in my Airbnb in Taipei, I've never talked in here before, I guess, and I didn't know so echo it, yeah, I'm kind of trapped inside because there's a potential typhoon coming through, I don't think it's actually supposed to be a direct typhoon, it's just, you know, passing by, but could be a problem, so I got some supplies, a punk or down, but right now it's only a bit of rain, just a bit of rain outside, but anyway, yes, over this episode, that last bit is actually from next episode, you know, where I figured I should take all my yammering about the reservoir and the lakes and put it all together, snip that part out of next episode, put it on at the end of this episode instead, but I also, as an additional Koda, I wanted to mention that, yeah, I was like, whoa, this lake was actually inside Tom, I walked inside Tom, dude, I like walked there, man, I mean, it did seem cool because compared to, you know, over by Ikebukuro, where inside Tom is on the other side of the Erakawa, it's like, wow, yeah, that place, that's like another place, you just, you never think you could just walk there, but yeah, it turns out you can, in plenty of other areas of the border, but yeah, this idea that it was my first time accidentally going to Saitama, it's actually just in case there's any geography nerds out there who might have noticed this, as if anybody fucking remembers these many details that apparently even I didn't remember, but I'd been to Saitama already, semi by accident, is when I went to that place, Kawagoe, when I, I just got on 40:00 the train at Nakahitabashi, and instead of going to Ikebukuro, I went the other way, let's just go the other way, see how far I can go, and I didn't quite make it all the way to the end of the line, but I went pretty far, and yeah, I guess I just didn't realize at the time that I was inside Tom, because my pre-downloaded Google Maps stopped working, because I was too far north, which should have tipped me off right there, of course it stopped working, because I hadn't downloaded the map of Saitama, but I didn't piece that together at the time.

So yeah, I don't know, just let it mention that as the final little bow and the story of the crazy lake is, yeah, I've been to Saitama before, but I didn't know that's where I was. I accidentally ended up in Saitama on the train, and now I accidentally ended up in Saitama on foot. Now if I can just accidentally parachute into Saitama, or burrow up through the ground into Saitama, I'll cover all the bases. But that's it for this episode, thank you for listening. Next episode is the Ome Hill's hiking course, and it's a good one, because it ends up being kind of an important spot. I'll just spoil it, but on my last day in Japan, where it's like, this is my last chance, I can only go one more place. This is the place that I decided to go back to. It's so good. It's so good. So that's next episode. Please enjoy. I'll see you then, Adios.