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| Haikyo / Ruins | BE Labs | (Entered Jun. 09, 2009) |
Recent Haikyo/Ruins: | |||
Usually when it rains on a weekend you'll find me stuck glumly indoors, plans such as bicycling or hiking having been cancelled. There is one outdoor activity however where I find that rain is actually preferable to sunny skies, and that's haikyoing. Why? Perhaps it's because the mystery and foreboding of a haikyo are amplified in rainy weather. Add an isolated mountain location, and throw in some mist, and suddenly a rainy Sunday is looking pretty good.
Our destination this time around was BE Labs, not a labratory unfortunately but a small hotel/resort complex no doubt used as a getaway by company employees. Located in the mountains of Izu, it was quite easy to find.
And to enter. With no fences, security, locked doors, boarded windows or things to climb, this is strictly a beginner haikyo. In fact all the doors of the place were wide open in welcome. To be honest, this does take a bit of the thrill and challenge away from the experience...
As usual, the three of us split up upon entering, each of us going off on his own seperate adventure. The place wasn't that big, but it was big enough that the three of us rarely ran into each other.
Once again we were to meet some random strangers during our explorations, but unfortuntely this time around they weren't cute girl cosplayers. As I was walking around some rooms in the back I was startled to suddenly hear Japanese voices speaking. I froze in place wondering both if they were the authorities, and whether they'd already found MJG and Lucas out. As one voice came closer, I realized I couldn't leave my current location without being seen...
To avoid the weirdness of him walking in on me while I was just standing there, I started forward, intending to just walk by whoever it was nonchalantly. As I did so, I said 'konnichiwa' but he didn't even glance in my direction.... Turned out that Lucas and Mike had already talked to him so he wasn't surprised to see a some random foreigner walking out of a supposedly abandoned room. Lucas informed me that the guy had once worked here long ago, and had come back to relive lost memories or some such...
The Japanese guys didn't stay long, and we were once again left in silence, not to mention dust and decay. Usually when I haikyo I wear one of those surgical mask thingys (the ones you always see Japanese people wearing when they're sick or have allergies) in an effort to limit the amount of toxic chemicals such as abestos (which is present in these old buildings) that I breathe in. Most old Japanese buildings, as well as a lot of new ones, are still constructed with archaic safety regulations.
I also wear gloves, which I didn't forget. Too much caution? Maybe, but haikyos are filthy places. Something about that combination of inorganic materials fighting with organic ones makes for a nasty combination. No doubt about which one will eventually win though, and open doors and broken windows will only speed up the process.
Like the last haikyo I went on, there was one room where a homeless person had obviously lived for a while, full of garbage, old pots and pans, umbrellas, comic books, and what have you, and like before, it was a depressing sight. Not sure which would be worse, living in some cardboard boxes or living in some rotten old building. Hope I never have to find out.
Like I said before, the place was pretty small, so I had thoroughly seen everything in less than 2 hours. Lucus finished around the same time I did, but MJG, as usual needed more time to go over every square inch of the place.
We headed out again with two other destinations in mind, but of the three that were marked down on the map, one had already been destroyed and the other was either gone or very, very well hidden. We spent about 2 hours trying to find that last one, with Lucas stopping the car every 10 minutes, asking every single person we came across for directions, none of whom had any real clue. We finally gave up as the light started to fade, and headed home. Not many big/interesting Kanto area haikyos left to discover, time to start heading farther afield!
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Gankutsu Rock Hotel
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