We have completed the first section of our international adventure with our week in Japan. We had an awesome time visiting Tokyo, Kyoto and Nara. It was really cool to see three cities of very different sizes.
Tokyo is amazing. There are so many people, but everything is so well organized and things are so efficient. We had an awesome little hotel that was near Kanda station so we were able to walk most places and the subway trains come every three minutes. There are also lots of parks, temples and shrines that provide a lot of beauty within the city.
Omotesando (Harajuku)
One of the coolest things we did in Tokyo was going to the fish market, which is the largest fish market in the world. It was a market that was the size of a small city and sold pretty much anything that came from the ocean. We spent probably an hour just walking around and looking at all the crazy sea critters that could be purchased. We also visited the Imperial Palace, Meiji Jingu Shrine, Ueno Park and walked around Ginza, Shinjuku and Shibuya.
We rode the bullet train to Kyoto, which was an experience in itself. We stayed in a cool little hostel near Kyoto station and spent most of our time walking around the city. Our favorite parts of Kyoto were visiting Kinkakuji Temple (the Golden Temple) and Kiyomizudera Temple and walking around the Gion district and seeing all the Geishas. If we had stayed in Japan longer I think Gina would have been heading to Geisha school.
Kinkakuji Temple
View of Kyoto from Kiyomizudera
From Kyoto we took a day trip out to Nara, which was just a 45 minute train ride. Nara has a large beautiful park that we spent most of the day walking around. The park is home to many many deer who are friendly as long as you are feeding them these special crackers that they sell in the park. As soon as you stop feeding the deer they become quite disgruntled and start head butting people until they get more crackers. They weren't really doing it that hard, but it was definitely hard enough to put a good scare into the kids that were feeding them, which never stopped being entertaining to us.
Nara park also is home to the Todaiji Temple, which has a very impressively large statue of Buddha. Behind the statue is a wooden pillar with a very small square hole that is very good luck to pass through. Despite the fact that most of the people going through we're small children (who needed the good luck to get back through the park with out being viscously rammed by crack(er)ed out deer), we decided to go through. It was a pretty tight squeeze, but hopefully we now have some added luck for the trip.
We also spent a lot of time in Japan eating. The food was great and surprising less expensive than what we had been expecting. Our best meals were a bowl of spicy pork ramen in Tokyo (Kinkabou) and a sushi boat place in Kyoto (Musashi). I think we tried everything on the sushi boat except for the the horse sashimi, which we just couldn't bring ourselves to eat.
The weather in Japan was quite cold. It snowed on us as we were leaving Kyoto and while on the train we passed through a blizzard so we are very much looking forward to some Thailand sunshine.
A big thanks to Marcia, Bill and Brent for all the great recommendations in Japan. They really helped make our trip great.
Hope everyone is doing well at home.
B and G
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