Two weekends ago, we went on a magical trip to Okinawa. The trip was perfect, starting from being the first on and off the plane (which was more about the fact we had a wheelchair)

We ate lots of yummy food. Here, I’m about to dive into a lovely bowl of soba. I’ll save the rest of the food photos for a separate food-update.

We went for a stroll down a colourful market in Naha.

And some bigggg blowfish

As you can see, we had a tropical theme going.

The trip was actually Kapu’s birthday present trip. So we had a lovely birthday cake!

And here we are taking a rest from the rigours of holidaying.

And enjoying an amazing cocktail at dinner.

Swimming in the sea was the highlight of the trip! It was amazingly fun.

I could do it alllll day long!!

Visiting the famous Churami Aquarium was another fantastic experience.

Here we got to see the amazing Okinawan tropical fish – alive and swimming.

But the most amazing part was the massive shark tank. Words do not do it justice.

The glass is a couple of foot thick.

Everyone enjoyed looking at the hundreds of fish, sharks, mantra rays and who knows what else inside the massive tank.

We even stopped to have a drink with one.

Ooops, slipped in another food picture. Yummy Okinawan rice!!

At the village, there was the opportunity to dress in traditional Okinawan clothes. History shows that Okinawa was heavily influenced by neighbouring countries, such as Taiwan, Korea, etc.

Okinawa was an amazing experience. Returning/going to other tropical islands is definitely on my to-do list.

Now, back to work!

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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.

I have a lot of catching up to do. Yes, I know you’re all waiting for some pictures of the anime stuff I’ve bought, but you’ll have to be patient just a little longer. I haven’t had a chance to take the photos yet (and I want to try something that might turn out cool).

The Tokyo subway system is pretty awesome, but SO complicated. You really have to plan out your journey and figure out where to change before you start your journey.

We went to Shibuya and this is the super-famous crossing that you always see on TV etc. It wasn’t as busy as it could have been.

This is the famous dog called Hachiko that is often mentioned in animes. Correct me if I’m wrong, but the story is that he would meet his owner at the train station everyday after work , and that after the owner died, he kept going to the station to wait.

Random pic of Shibuya.

And here’s some cosplay from Harajuku. Eye cancer included.

There wasn’t as much cosplay as I expected, but then the whole trip Tokyo wasn’t as packed as expected/normal.

The best cosplay, to be honest, were the girls who were just walking around Harajuku in maid costumes, pretty dresses and such. Made it a bit hard to take photos.

Live music was included though. And it wasn’t even that bad.

This poor neko was being mauled by a..well, not sure what to call him. He had a massive camera and after every shot he would adjust the girl’s arm/pose, to get the perfect shot.

Half the cosplay wasn’t even really cosplay imho. Just funkily dressed ppl.

I want to go back to Tokyo when it’s a bit busier and take a lot more photos.

But failing that, can always just buy the costumes and get my gf to dress up

Lots of funky art around. This place had an Tokyo Okonomiyaki restaurant inside which is really popular. We had to wait an hour for seats.

Which brings us onto the topic of food.

This:

Becomes:

Which then becaome this as we decided to make one massive one rather than two small ones:

Which becomes this:

It’s actually really yummy. I prefer it over Osaka Okonomiyaki, but nothing beats Hiroshima Okonomiyaki. This is a heart. Because I love my gf.

Oh, and I can’t forget dessert can I. Someone tell me if you can get Haagen Dazs in Australia, because I’ve never seen it around.

Blogging catch up begins NOW!

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~

Prepare to scale heights, plunge into the anime world of Akihabara, view the awesome food I’ve eaten, and more. The picto-blog will take you on a journey to experience a slice of Japan.

The journey began on a clear, yet cold, Christmas Day, catching a Shinkansen to Mount Aso. This was the FIRST time I’ve been on a shinkansen, and it didn’t disappoint.

Smiling me. I went from Hiroshima to Hakata to Kumamoto to Mount Aso.

There are lots of different types of Shinkansens. Hikari, Kodama, Nozumi, Ariake. They use different trains and have different speeds (both train and number of stops wise). Kodama is the slowest, and Nozumi is the fastest. Ariake is specific to Kyushuu (I believe). This is the Ariake. Kind looks like a prison train to me.

The Ariake is a pretty funky train. It’s very compartmentalised, this is the compartment I was in. You can also see that the overhead storage is like that of a plane. Swanky eh.

On Japanese trains and buses, you’re not meant to talk on your mobile. You will see lots and lots of people sms-ing, playing games, reading ebooks etc, but if your phone rings, everyone will glare at you, and sometimes the conductor will even put an announcement asking you to switch your phone to silent and not talk on the train. On Shinkansen’s, you have to go into the corridor sections, or use special compartments like this one below.

I spent something like 5 hours travelling from Hiroshima to Mount Aso, by three Shinkansen’s, two trains and a bus. I won’t bore you with my scenery shots, but this shot was taken at 10x zoom, and I thought was pretty cool. Wind power ftw!

Now we come to the Mount Aso volcano caldera area.

It’s the largest active caldera in the world. The last major blast was in 1993, but there have been explosions over the past 300 000 years. The crater has a 128km circumference.

I actually didn’t go up to the crater (they run a cable car up to it), but stopped 5 minutes away at the Museum/Observatory. When I got there, I saw a neighbouring hill behind the complex, and spied a path at the top of it. I thought it would be a great place to get an awesome view of the crater.

Zoom on a camera ftw. This is a zoomed-in picture taken of the path from the mountain in the picture aove that I saw from the complex.

There were busloads of tourists, chinese, japanese and korean, but avoiding them, I struck out on a path heading in a likely direction. After a few ups and downs and lefts and rights, I came to a crossroad, and naturally, chose the road less travelled (or most weathered).

It wasn’t easy, both the path and the weather.

It was blowing a GALE the higher I got. I was almost knocked down several times, and when it got REALLY bad, I actually had to lie on the ground, to be shielded partially from the wind by the grass. ==” Did I mention it was COLD? There was no snow, but there was ice around.

Even though I was freezing, the view from the top was simply spectacular, and worth every step.

Pictures are worth a thousand words.

And this one is prob worth two thousand. The wind was SO strong, not to mention I was looking into the sun.

It was amazing. I called this post “peek climbing”, because I was climbing another mountain to “peek” at the Mount Aso volcano. After getting off the mountain, I made the trek back to Kumamoto, and went to defrost in the hotel bath.

Tomorrow’s blog post will cover my adventures in Kumamoto City, then following blogs will adventure to sushi train, Tokyo and my growing anime collection.

Stay tuned!

I hope everyone is having a very merry christmas and feeling relaxed and contented after their christmas meals and presents. We had an awesome xmas dinner last night, which I will blog about later, although I didn’t get to have a white christmas this year.

I’m heading off in a few minutes to the South Island of Japan for a night, then heading up to Tokyo till New Years Eve, when I’ll return home to celebrate the New Year with the family.

This will be the first time I’m travelling on a Shinkansen, so I’m reallllly excited!!

There’ll be a massive influx of updates, LOTS of photos and more when I get back from Tokyo, so I hope you all enjoy yourselves and stay tuned~

Below are some of the many christmas light decorations that individual homes had going around the town, just to tide you over till I get back and blog my heart out.