Memories of Kyoto

Good morning from Kyoto.

We got in late last night, which is why I am posting in the morning instead of at night.

We arrived in Kyoto, then Matt, Bram, and I did a tour of some of the places that were familiar to us from our last trip. Cristian and Ambernay went shopping separately from us.

Our apartment is... all right. 

 The main room. Our only table is a coffee table surrounded by couches,

 The TV is finicky; unless you can figure out the right settings (in japanese), you will be watching a black screen or snow, and it occasionally cuts out randomly.

The kitchen.

This chandelier is of the exact style that we have at my house. It is weird to see something so familiar in such a foreign environment.

The three of us the Nishiki market, and ended up going to COCO Ichibanya Curry House for dinner. Reading the menu, it became apparent that all the curries contain meat sauce, so it seems that I had some pork in my meal when I last came to Japan. Whoops. I ended up having rice with garlic and a salad this time around.

An excerpt from the menu. Silly Japan, that isn't what Potato salad is (or egg salad, or tuna salad).

Early Morning Tour

Good morning from Fukuoka. Early video upload today. Made a mistake in the video and called the city Nagasaki, my bad. We'll be heading out to Kyoto later today so see you soon.

Nagasaki

Hello again.


Today, we ventured out on a day trip to Nagasaki. Like Hiroshima, it was a target of a nuclear blast during WWII, and bears the scars and heritage associated with such a tragedy.

An exhibit from the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum

A model of Nagasaki and the surrounding area. They had a projector trained on this, to show relevant areas and radii.

A 1:1 scale replica of the "Fatman" bomb, with a cut out cross section.

The museum was again very interesting, and quite depressing. The testimonials they had posted stood out to me, but I did not capture them for this blog.

The Nagasaki Peace Statue. It is a 10m tall bronze statue.

A fountain; with the Peace Statue visible in the background. It really is massive.

My camera died shortly after this, but we had seen most of what we came to see anyway. We got some food and did a bit of shopping, then went back on the train to Fukuoka.

Remembering the past

Apologies for the late post. We went on a day trip to Nagasaki this time. Enjoy the videos and look forward to Colin's blog.

Amagase II and Fukuoka

Today, we checked out of the Ryokan and made our way to Fukuoka.

As promised, here are photos of the grounds from the Ryokan:

The entrance to the main building.

 A foot bath.

One of the paths on the property. I believe this was between the main building, and the baths that you had to reserve.

Steps leading to the main building.

Small streams like this one ran all over the property. This was by the main entrance.

The main reception. The whole building seems to have been built around a massive boulder.

A courtyard.



We arrived in Fukuoka, and our apartment is nice.

View from the main entrance.

The first bedroom. Contains 2 double beds.

The main area, with us busily unpacking.

The kitchen; very modern and western.

The master bedroom.

Cristian and Kuma-san saying hello. 

Unfortunately, the building is under construction, so there is what appears to be wet paint in the halls and apparently the hot water doesn't work in the shower.

Update: Apparently there was a hot water panel that we did not know about that you had to use to enable the hot water.

We walked for a few hours to some shops, a supermarket, and to get some pizza. It was over 30ºC out, so that took a lot out of us.

Amagase

Our first night at a Ryokan is here! It is in the middle of nowhere, and extremely nice. I didn't get photos of the grounds, but I plan to tomorrow, as they are definitely worthy of it.

After a monorail, train, shinkansen, train, and a bus (graciously driven by our hosts), we arrived.

 The last train was really old-styled, it had wooden floors.

An old-fashioned firetruck. Not really relevant, but I thought it was cool.

A river runs next to the train station we arrived at. Note the stone baths on the right. We tried to figure out how to get down there, but the only way we saw was locked, and the lock was infested with spiders, so it is unlikely they are still in use.

Our hosts were very gracious, and did several nice things for us; they drove a bus down to pick us up from the train station, they upgraded us from a single room to two rooms, and were nice enough to give us a thorough explanation of our accommodations. It is an old-fashioned establishment, with a bunch of customs surrounding when you should and should not wear shoes and slippers,  which Onsen (hot spring baths) require a reservation, and when you would like your meals (they do full-service meals, with ~9 courses, so they expect you to be punctual). They were even able to accommodate the two vegetarians among us.

I don't have good photos of the grounds yet, so I will show a few sample images from our rooms 

Our private open air bath. Incredibly nice view.

We booked two reservation-only Onsen; they had a view of the river, which was nice enough to warrant me wearing glasses into the bath. For decency reasons, I did not bring a camera.

I will also show a few sample images of our meals (both vegetarian and non-)

Appetizers

Ingredients to be added to a broth with Tofu.

Soup, vegetarian sashimi, and Soba noodles.

Dessert

I plan to get photos of the ridiculously nice area around here tomorrow, and to take at least 2 more baths before we leave.

Ryokan!!!!

Super quick upload. Enjoy the video and get jealous 😜

Hot Springs Time

Good morning from Hiroshima. I understand my wrong doings and have change to my video to widescreen 😅
Just wanted to do a quick video before we head out to Fukuoka. We might not have internet there which explains why I did this video this close to the last one. I'll be making another video when we get there though.

Hiroshima

We visited Hiroshima again. We did not do Miyajima again, mainly because we were tired, so we instead shopped around for a bit before heading back home.

Hiroshima is very interesting, but quite depressing. On August 6th, it will be the 70th anniversary of the bombing, so it was ramping up for that. Part of the Peace Museum was closed, and the grounds were being prepared for it. In addition, there was an effort of a group called Kids' Guernica; we met a man named Nobuyuki Ookame who showed us their campaign against nuclear war using children's art.

Afterwards, we had Hiroshima-style Okonimiyaki, which was quite good. There was a hot area on the table to keep the food warm, and the restaurant boasted having both English and Vegetarian menus.

Mine is in the bottom right; it had dried garlic flakes on it, which were amazing.

We are going to pack up tonight, because we're leaving for our Ryokan tomorrow; I'm not sure what the internet situation will be there, so you may or may not hear from us then.

Visiting hisitory

Good morning. Sorry for the late post. But we spent the day touring around Hiroshima. Colin will be giving a summary in a bit. Anyways enjoy the video ^o^

Trains, trains, trains

Hello again.

On our second day, we did another tour of Asakusa, then made our way to Ushita in Hiroshima.


It was not a short journey. We took a train, to another train, to a Shinkansen, to another Shinkansen, to a train, to a subway, to our destination.

It was in fact the longest one we will be taking, as most of our other ones will be us making our way back towards Tokyo, or just day trips to various locations.

Lots of countryside to be seen, as we pass by it at 150-170 mph. 

Our room was pretty big, and its main area has tatami mats. It will serve as our base of operations in Hiroshima.

We were pretty tired from the journey, so we mostly stayed in for the remainder of the night.

We have returned!!

Ohayo Tokyo! After 4 years we're back! Going to try and avoid over blogging the same info. So I've decided to do videos instead. Enjoy!

R

We're back!

So we're back and we have 2 more people with us this time. Matt, Bram, and I are on our second tour, and Cristian and Ambernay have joined us for it.

We shared our plane with some Scouts on the way to their jamboree.

Our flight was long and direct, so after a few movies and stealing a few winks, we arrived in Japan. You know you are in Japan when you start to see signs like this one:

We picked up all of our things from the airport (portable wifi, Japan Rail passes), and then went on our way to our apartment where we are staying for the night (we are just staying the one night here before heading west). We took a Train to Asakusa, and were surprised to discover a massive festival going on.

This would ordinarily be great, but after being on a plan for 13 hours, then taking a train, all the while hauling luggage, then navigating said luggage through densely packed crowds in the ~30º heat and humidity, it made for an interesting day. A few streets were closed to accommodate the festival, with police directing the crowds with loudspeakers.

Lots of people were wearing Yukatas and other festival-wear. Lots of people were sitting in the streets in order to view the fireworks that would be happening later.

We finally got to our place, which was quite nice, if a little cosy when split between 5 people. It was near where we stayed in Tokyo on the last trip. We quickly unloaded our luggage and did our best to recover from the heat for a bit.

After that, we went back out to check out the festival. I didn't get as many pictures as I wanted, because as it turns out, night photography is pretty hard when you don't know the settings on your camera very well.

All in all, a good first day.


Locations:

Narita Airport

Asakusa