Here’s a short pictorial overview of some of the great stuff we’ve been upto here in Japan from when I got here in mid-December up until New Years Day 2010.

Please feel free to comment at the end by clicking on “Comments”.

When I first got to Japan, after the drama of my flight being cancelled by Jetstar (and ruining a bunch of plans), we had a combined welcome party for both myself, and the latest JET program teacher and his family who were visiting.

His girlfriend came a few day later and we had another party, with Japanese curry for dinner.

As Christmas was coming and my mum had given the family a gingerbread house as a present, we, together with a friend, built our very first gingerbread house!!

And a triumphant group after finishing!

We had Christmas dinner at a Japanese restaurant. Lots of fun!

Fun for everyone!

After christmas we gave the doghouse a makeover and painted it pink!

It suits her!

My birthday was up next. We went to a nearby hotel where we went for a hike in the beautiful mountains and used their onsens, which faced the mountains and the bay.

We also had a special blowfish dinner (yes the poisonous kind the chef needs a license for). Yum! And we’re still alive

And the birthday cake! When it is cut, it makes little heart shapes! Cute and smart (and tasty!)

We then went to Matsue in Shimane and stayed at a hot spring hotel, Cho rakuen (長楽園). This place has the largest natural outdoor onsen, and it is mixed bathing, which is fairly unique for Japan.

It also has great food. Here’s us having a special set dinner.

We’re in our own special dining room.

Great food and drink.

And here’s the food. This was the first course. There were several other courses as well consisting of lobster and fish.

And the Sashimi platter. Did I mention Sashimi? YUM!

And after all the eating. This is the entire family, including grandmother and great-aunt.

We had a cold change come through and it started snowing!

One other great thing about the hotel is that we were staying in the suites. Which had their own private onsen per room.

I loveeeee hot springs. At our overnight stay I went 7 times into the hotsprings. Which is quite a lot, but it’s soooo good!

Driving back was a little scary with all the roads snowed over. Several feet of snow in places!

And a family photo as we were leaving.

We came back on New Years Eve, in time to have some soba and sushi for dinner, as well as watch the special NHK New Years Eve TV show.

New Years Day is big in Japan. We went to the temple and then came back for brunch.

And everyone welcomes in 2010.

Including shin-shin.

2010 has just begun. A new chapter with lots of new and exciting adventures awaiting.

Wishing everyone a safe, prosperous and happy new year for 2010.

]]> http://www.leginag.com/2010/01/japan2009/feed/ 1 http://www.leginag.com/2009/01/mcdonalds/ http://www.leginag.com/2009/01/mcdonalds/#comments Tue, 13 Jan 2009 06:37:44 +0000 Leginag http://www.leginag.com/?p=183 For whatever reason, I simply don’t like McDonalds at home. Yet I love McDonalds in Beijing and Japan.

They have an awesome ￥100  and ￥120 menu, which is around a dollar or two, exchange rate dependant.

The pictures suck, will get some better ones later.

Sorting rubbish is BIG in Japan. Even in Maccas. At the top there is a hole to put in unfinished drinks.

This is a sorta filler post, I admit it, using sub-par photos. I’ll go take some better ones soon.

My brief visit to Japan’s South Island over, it was time to hit the train tracks and take the Shinkansen up to Tokyo. This time, I got to travel on 3 different shinkansens.

The journey itself took about 5 hours.

The insides of the train are similar to a coach bus. The cushiony seats are reclinable, there’s plenty of leg room (even for me) and you can put stuff above you.  They have different configurations, 2-2seats and 2-3 seats.

The scenery and views on the journey was an interesting glimpse into Japan.

Within an hour, we were in snowfields, and I was sooo tempted to get off the train just to play around in it.

Japan is pretty mountainous, which makes for amazing scenes and contrasts.

The ’scenery’ highlight on the train ride was definitely seeing this mountain.

Mount Fuji. Pretty slick eh.

Tokyo station was a seething mass of people, however it is under massive construction, due to be finished in 2010 or 2012, so wasn’t really that picture worthy. There are lots of random scultuptures and such around though.

This is the “Peace Clock”. Not sure what about it represents peace, but there you have it. It should also be noted that Tokyo is a candidate city for the 2016 Olympic Games.

After checking into our super-tiny hotel room, we decided to try something fun and go restaurant hopping for dinner.

The aim was for a round of drinks and small dishes at each one. Sake was at the first restaurant.

I guess it’s getting a bit old me showing all these photos of food, so I’ll “select” a few from the second restaurant. Scallops anyone?

Or how about a yoghurt-ish shaka shaka drink?

At a lot of restaurants (ones I saw anyway), after the 25th of December, they raise their prices in anticipation of New Years. So it wasn’t as cheap as it could have been. As a result, we decided to raid 7/11 and take the party back home.

My best friend Haagen-dazs was there as well. I’ve only ever had Haagen-Dazs when I was in China, and afaik, it’s not available in Sydney. Heaven knows why. I mean, we have TWO lindt cafes! Why not Haagen-Dazs.

This post is being cut a little short, in order to meet publishing deadlines, (and because I want to sleep now.) (And if you didn’t realise, that was my birthday dinner above =p)

So I’ll leave you with this little gem I found on the Tokyo subway.

Juicy Tokyo photos and more tomorrow!

Stay Tuned~

The 26th of December dawned a bright and sunny day, albeit cold, and what better way to spend it than by visiting Kumamoto Castle. This is only the second castle I’ve been to in Japan.

While it may look impressive, it is a little disappointing that most of the Castle was rebuilt in 1960, with restorations beginning in 1998. The Castle has the two main towers, 49 turrets, 18 gates with turrets and 29 additional gates, and was this version of the castle was originally built around 1600AD.

This tower/turret, however, is quite a bit older and was quite scary to walk in. The floorboards kept bending as I walked on them, and creaked quite ominously.

All the doorways were also ridiculously low, standing at maybe 1.5m tall.

The castle would look really, really good in Spring, when the Cherry Blossom trees were in bloom. Unfortunately, in winter, all I get to look at is the barebones of trees.

The castle had high walls (you can see a person in the pic for comparison)

It also had a moat.

And lots of windows for shooting arrows and guns out of on unsuspecting passerbys (or enemies) =p.

The castle has a good surrounding view. In this picture you can see (at 10x zoom) Mount Aso in the distance.

The castle, while looking nice, was pretty much designed for tourists when they re-built it. There are concrete stairs throughout the centre of the castle, and all the floors are exhibits. This contrasts to Himeji Castle, which I quite prefer.

The Honmaru Goten Palace, recently rebuilt, is so new and sparkly, you can even SMELL the new wood. It’s almost scary how new it is. It is, however, faithfully reproduced, and even uses traditional techniques for joining the wood and such.

And some, what I believe to be preserved versions, or more proably replicas, of some of the door designs.

Traditional New Years decorations. You’ll see these all over the place in Japan.

After walking through the Castle and a few of its turrets, I went for lunch =) Fried Oysters.

And I finished it pretttyyy quickly.

Kumamoto Castle was nice, but all-in-all, I prefer Himeji Castle. Perhaps it wasn’t the best thing to go and see the top-rated (or one of) Himeji Castle in Japan first, but there you go. Probably not the most fascinating blog I’ve done, but it’s an important cultural part of Japan, and much of the Castle area is World Heritage (13 buildings).

After leaving Kumamoto, I went for a sushi-train dinner with the family, and then went to Tokyo. More on that soon!

Stay tuned~

For those that have read my posts about food, the fact that I love sashimi comes across pretty obviously.

The new years massive obento’s I blogged about yesterday have already disappeared to a better place, and today is also an important New Years day for Japanese.

We also went to another shrine today, a bigger one, and prayed for good luck. This shrine also had a lady who shook an oharai (a paper rod thingy) over us, which is meant to get rid of our sins.

So, when the parents came back with this special box this afternoon, which will be the centerpiece of our dinner tonight, I was literally jumping with glee. Yes, glee.

Update: Outside, we’re cooking Oysters, massive ones, on an open fire, which is pretty awesome!! This is one batch of fresh oysters being cooked. Nice dinner anyone?

I am going to have a very, very awesome dinner tonight. Happy New Year everyone =D

Japanese New Years food. Enough to put a smile on your face and food to face the day

This is the sunrise over East Hiroshima on January 1st, 2009. It rose at about 7am, but was unfortunately covered by a cloud bank, which moved on later during the day. To make things even better, it SNOWED for a few minutes today. It was short, but it WAS snow.

I experienced my first New Years in Japan, and it is VERY different. Great emphasis is placed on family time. Also, the first three days of the New Year are more important than New Years Eve. We spent the 31^st, after arriving back from Tokyo,  just having dinner and watching some special programme on TV, which was fun and all, and stayed up till midnight.

Just before midnight, all (or a lot of) shrines start ringing their bells. They ring them 108 times. Apparently it is because we have 108 sins and it atones for them. We saw on TV a lot of people at shrines for midnight, which was quite impressive.

We woke up for sunrise on the 1st, then went to a shrine and rang the bell and prayed for the new year. I also went for a luck reading (not sure what to call it, but you pick it out of a box), and I got “Best Luck”. There are 5 of them, ranging from Super Bad, Bad, Normal, Good Luck and Best Luck. So I was really lucky!

These were just a few of the many different paintings and sculputures and such that were around the temple.

We came back for brunch, and this was seriously amazing. I really don’t want to rub it in how awesome it was…but…like…omg?!?! The pictures don’t really do it that much justice, but just think MASSIVE obentos, with EVERYTHING in them. From teriyaki chicken, to lobster,  prawns, oysters, beef, sashimi, tempura, cooked fish, to so many things I don’t even know the names of, but are super tasty!

I have pictures of the individual boxes, but I won’t torment you with them. We all enjoyed ourselves immensely.

For dinner, we finished up what was left in the boxes, and added a few dishes, like lobster salad, fried oysters among others.

The whole family was here, so it was pretty busy, but lots of fun.

New Years was summed up pretty nicely as: Eating, Sleeping, Drinking and Talking. Family time. For 3 days (or so). We did all of that, and even played some new years games which was heaps of fun.

The picture above is of the chocolate xmas cake we had after dinner (specially ordered for me, because I loveeeeeee chocolate cake, lucky me!).  The two candle holders on the left were made by the brother, who is an awesome artist!

Chicken is the food of choice, rather than ham or turkey, and KFC and the like are very popular on christmas. We went to an “all-you-can-order-food-and-drink” restaurant with the family, and it was lots and lots of fun. We had chicken, as you can see below, and it was super-oishii!!

The food then started to flow.

We all had lots and lots and lots of fun!

As did the drinks. The drinking age in Japan is 20, which is surprising. You also can apply for your license at 18 (rather than our 16).

As is now my custom at an all-you-can-eat, I try and eat as much sashimi as I can. It’s SO yum! These are the first two platters, very nicely sized, if I may say so myself.

We ended up ordering 5 platters, and I had to eat the last two by myself, and I couldn’t even finish the last two pieces of sashimi, I was THAT full of fish and food.

The restaurant had a very nice feel, with big wooden pillars everywhere.

The bathroom was pretty funky too.

Just some more pictures of the awesome, yummy food.

With these “all-you-can-order” restaurants, they give you a two hour time limit, and your last order comes thirty minutes or so before the end. They also charge an extra fee for the drinks, how much varies, but it is usually a few hundred yen more (or a thousand, depends when and where).

It was a lovely, lovely christmas dinner, and although I couldn’t be home for my family dinner, I really felt special, and it was full of cheer and lots of food! Yummy food.

Lots of fun to be had by all! I got rejected at the Reindeer Idol auditions, apparently my nose wasn’t up to scratch.

I hope everyone had an awesome Christmas!

On Friday we went to a buffet restaurant called “Cotton Club” which had three floors, and the buffet. It had a very Western/marine feel to it, similar to the train we took to Fukuyama. The restaurant was very popular and had lots of parties in there, but the area we were in was very cozy, and most importantly, close to the buffet!

And the first set of dishes we ate. The food had everything, from pizza, to fried tofu to daikon to dumplings, noodles, potatoes, beef, fish and everything. <3 The photos don’t really do the food justice, but they are really yummy!

On Sunday, to celebrate our ‘mini-anniversary’ or what I call K-day, we went to an all-you-can-order-food-and-drink restaurant, which was only 2800yen for males and 2600yen for females. I guess guys eat and drink more than girls. But 200yen isn’t that much of a difference…

The restaurant had nice tables and enclosed areas, and a vague Japanese atmosphere.

The drinks were a nice size. You could only order the next round once you had eaten/drunk everything first. Stops us from being too greedy =p

The food was yum. We ordered, well lots of stuff, and this was the first batch to arrive. Once the food started coming, the photos stopped being taken. You can see Takoyaki, pork and cheese rolls and karaage chicken.

Tabasco sauce, as my mouth can attest to, has not lost any of its potency through being exported from the USA to Japan. It went really well on the pizza we got (picture of pizza missing as it was in my stomach already).

But now we come to the best part. In China, you were limited to one plate of sashimi. But here in Japan, you can order as many – as – you – like. It makes going to the buffet WORTH IT. SUCH GOOD VALUE!!

The first plate of sashimi. You’ll notice my drink is Calpis, which is an awesome drink that we don’t have back down under. The sashimi plate had prawns, tuna, squid and salmon.

The second plate of sashimi was just Salmon, but it was REALLY FRESH! Like, omg, fresh!

The third plate of sashimi was Salmon also. I love salmon. <3. This photo also features a flying fried dumpling-like food.

The fourth plate was the sashimi selection platter again. They had several other sashimi plates available, but <3 salmon and tuna. Jealous yet?

We then took a break from all the awesome food to have dessert.

After dessert, when the last order time came around, I simply HAD to order another plate of salmon sashimi, and here you see the 5th and final plate of sashimi we had.

With a good exchange rate, it would have been AUD$28 for the meal, and even with the crappy exchange rate we have now, it was AUD$45 for the meal. The sashimi alone (not counting everything else we ate and drank) made it EXCELLENT value.

Man, I love sashimi, and where better to have it than in Japan? We’re going to another all-you-can-order restaurant for Christmas Eve. *grin*

Today we went to a small traditional Japanese restaurant for lunch. We had an awesomeeee freshly made soba noodle meal.

This is one of Kasumi’s favourite restaurants, using organic local food (yes, I’ve mentioned this restaurant a few times). Did I mention it was a buffet? *grin*

Seeing them and catching up with them, and hearing all their travelling stories was heaps of fun.

But the highlight was the food. Jodie enjoyed it lots and lots.