Cissybank has a lot of activities for its employees and their families, and we are semi-active members of the Walking Club, joining them about three times a year on their monthly hikes. Today was a special event, organised as a volunteer activity to entertain orphaned children, but the forty volunteers were at least equally well entertained as the twenty children. Mt. Tsukuba is a two hour bus ride from Tokyo, a cable car lifted us halfway up the mountain to the place where we met the children, we walked three hours across the mountain to meet the bus again, which took us to a camp site where we had barbecue. The whole day was perfectly well organised, we did not even have to bring food, water or backpacks, the weather was great, and the children in a good mood.

The Citiclub hike also passed the shrine on Mt. Tsukuba, but there was no time scheduled to actually visit it, which is a real pity since this is a very scenic mountain-shrine, and apparently important, too (they have an English brochure, which explains that the mountain has captured religious awe for as long as there have been people living in the Kanto Plains, and that the two divinities enshrined here, Izanagi-no-Mikoto and Izanami-no-Mikoto, are the sacred progenitors of the Japanese race and even gave birth to the very islands of Japan). While it is definitely not the spirit of pilgrimage to just drop by and pick up the temple seal, that was all I could do this time. To make things worse, I forgot to bring along my album and had to ask for the stamp to be issued on a loose leaf.