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Archive for the 'Japan' Category

Strange Things You Might See in Japan I

Thursday, February 14th, 2008

Here are a few interesting signs you might run into in Japan.

Please Don’t Stay Here

Come and visit, but for Pete’s sake leave!

Toilet Sign

Special needs toilets — only 1 legged headless women or otherwise normal headless men allowed.

Restroom sign

 While it may be in the depths of the parking lot, it WAS actually aboveground, at least.

For those of you who have not added your subscription via the “subscribe by email” link over to the right, this would be a good time to go ahead and do that before I turn off the old subscription form.

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Japan Gallery Added

Friday, February 1st, 2008

As you may not, not long ago (ok, we’ve been back 2 months almost!) we were in Japan on vacation. We had a great visit, saw some wonderful places and met awesome new friends. I finally sorted through the 1400+ pictures I took, culled the no-good / not useful ones, edited the rest, and distilled the best into their current form in the 2007 11 Japan gallery.

We went to Tokyo:

Samurai

 

We went to Nikko:

Nikko

…where we were on TV…

Me and the TV People

One mustn’t miss Mt. Fuji…

Mount Fuji

Went to Kyoto…

Kyoto Golden Pavillion

Met (not et) some deer in Nara…

Guli Meets A Deer In Nara

Saw the floating torii at Miyajima…

Miyajima Torii

Visited Hiroshima…

Hiroshima Peace Memorials

Marvelled at Himeji Castle…

Himeji Castle

 

And then we left, which was a bit of a drag, but isn’t it usually?

Check out the 2007 11 Japan gallery.

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Back from Japan

Thursday, December 6th, 2007

Well, we’ve made it back and are enjoying being at work again. If it wasn’t for being able to come back to work, vacation could go on forever! I took approximately 1419 pictures before the “why do you exist?” deletions started occurring. I haven’t had the chance to get through too many of them yet, but the upside is that most of my notes were actually written out instead of being notes, so a possibility exists that I may actually generate a trip report out of this. (We’ll see. :) )

We had a great time but should have taken a few more days. Several places cropped up where we thought “hey, we’d really like to see that” but were unable to due to lack of time. We ran in to several old friends and Uzbeks, some of whom were both. We made several new friends as well, which is always nice. Japan was very polite and friendly overall and quite a nice trip, which I highly recommend to anyone who can make it. It was much easier to get around than we had expected, though there were a few small snags here and there, but none were very bad.

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Oops! Site Was Broke!

Tuesday, November 27th, 2007

I did something silly and disabled a crucial plugin, disabling the site for a few days. I have fixed it now, and thankfully it was something simple that occurred to me fairly quickly. Sorry for the inconvenience!

Speaking of inconvenient, I am having trouble with these Japanese keyboards. Not everything is quite where it should be, though it is close…

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Tokyo Is Better Than Kyoto!

Monday, November 26th, 2007

This is for our two new great friends, Tsuji and Masa!

Guli wanted to stop at a particular bar / restaurant type place to have sushi for her birthday.  We went in, climbed upstairs, and sat down at the bar to Japanese menus.  Uska (?) gave us an English translation and recommended an item.  The guys at the end of the bar noticed we weren’t from around town and said hello.  One of the guys, Masa, had lived and worked in the states for 5 years and Tsuji had been there several times on business.  Tsuji really wanted to show us some of Japan in a way that we might not ordinarily see.  He’d been well treated in the US and wanted to return the favor to some other foreign travellers.  You could see in his eye that it truly came from his heart.  Sometimes you can worry someone is going to take advantage but they seemed very on the level.  Anyway, why wouldn’t you trust these guys?

Masa and Tsuji

We went out to this out of the way, tucked in down the street type place that was small but very inviting.  I’m not ordinarily a fan of anything uncooked but this place was truly incredible.  We were treated as honored guests and had great food and wonderful shochu (? - can’t vouch for a spelling there :) ) and great conversation, some of which was obvious to all parties involved, while most of it went through Masa the translator.

All of us

Well, it’s late and the full story must wait, but I really wanted to give Tsuji and Masa a shout out because they treated us grandly and we can’t say enough good things about them.  It truly was a wonderful evening and a special birthday for Guli that we will never forget.  And since they wanted us to go on our travels beleiving Tokyo to be better than Kyoto, I’m going to say that Kyoto is going to have a heck of an act to follow!

Tokyo is better than Kyoto! :)

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