85: EVERY DAY IS A GIFT

At least, I think that's what this is trying to say. On Main Street.

84: OMINOUS CHURCH

Some dramatic clouds behind St David's Anglican church.

83: GYM IT UP

I just joined the gym, and for work to pay 100% of my gym membership, I have to go five times a week. Can I do it?! I've done 4 days in a row so far this week, and it is so hard going so often. I am hoping I will get used to it and that it will get easier after a few weeks. I'm going to be so fit! Fit and tired and with no life, because I'll be spending all my spare time at the gym.

82: MORE ORCHIDS

One of my favourite flowers.

81: UMBRELLAS

It rained a lot when I was in Japan. I bought an umbrella from Daiso for 100 yen (about $1.25), but that broke after a day. So I ended up buying a 500 yen umbrella instead at a store in front of a random amusement park.

80: ANCHORS

I got myself an anchor-patterned jacket from the men's section in Japan and it fits perfectly.

79: SPRING BLOSSOMS

I missed the cherry blossoms in Japan, but the trees are blooming with them now in Vancouver. Spring is here!

78: EXPERT RESTORATION AND REPAIRS

77: BACK TO REALITY...

The reality of free bricks in Vancouver!

76: SAYONARA

It was my last day in Japan. Before I split up with the others, we headed down this street one more time for lunch. I was sad to say goodbye to my friends and to this awesome country, but I wanted to escape the radiation from the north!

Making takoyaki

I'll miss you Japan, with your wonderful people and technology and heated toilets. Most of all, I will miss your food: your mochi, ramen, udon, rice balls, bento boxes, pon de ringu, red bean, takoyaki, okonomiyaki, yakitori, tempura, karaage, gyoza, crepes, sushi, earl grey soy milk, jellies, champon, and soba. Cheese and mochi wrapped in bacon, deep fried cartilage. Avocado, pork, and cheese rolls...

I'll be back one day, because I'm not done with you yet. I still have to see the cherry blossoms in the spring, climb Mt Fuji with an oxygen tank, brave the Yakushima rainforest to see the ancient trees (2000 - 7200 years old!), sunbathe in the Okinawa beaches, eat kobe beef in Kobe, and bid for tuna at the Tsukiji fish market. Sumimasen!

Goodbye, sayonara - although I never heard anyone actually say this word while I was in Japan.

75: NARA

Lots of deer in Nara! Then it snowed, and it was cold.

74: BBQ MEAT

The Canadian government finally issued an official warning against non-essential travel to Tokyo because of the rolling blackouts and the unreliability of trains. We were supposed to head back to Tokyo for a few days after Osaka, but because of the government warning and the news about radiation leaks, we decided to see if we could fly out of Osaka instead of having to go back to Tokyo.

We spent all morning trying to sort everything out, and I just have to say, Thank God for Phoebe's skype phone and the free internet at the hotel. Unfortunately, the cheapest flight out of Osaka that I could find was $2800, which was almost 3 times the cost of my original flight! I chose that option, because I was fairly sure my insurance company would pay me back (in fact, I just read the insurance coverage and formal written warnings by the government against non essential travel is covered up to $3000 - yay!), whereas Jenn and Andy decided they would go back up to Tokyo and camp out at the Narita airport instead.

We ended up not doing very much in the city because of this, so the only pictures I took are of dinner at a barbeque restaurant. We each had 300 grams of meat and it was so good.

73: OSAKA

We had to wake up at 6am to attend the morning Buddhist prayers. It was cool - one monk chanted and banged on a drum while another monk slowly built and lit a fire. It was intense, especially when the smoke started billowing up towards the ceiling. After our vegetarian breakfast, it was time to leave the temple and head to our next destination - Osaka. We met up with Phoebe's friend Miyuko, who immediately took us to an okonomiyaki place for lunch. 

"Is there anything you want to do in particular in Osaka?" she asked me. I said no, and she said,  "There's nothing to do in Osaka except eat. Are you ok with that?" Of course I was okay with that! But I had no idea how serious she was. Right after we finished our okonomiyaki, we headed straight to a takoyaki (octopus balls) stand. Then right after we finished the takoyaki, we went to a pork bun shop!

We were pretty full by the time we finished the pork buns, so we walked around a bit. But then it was time for dinner at an izakaya place, where we had lots and lots of dishes to share. I forgot to take pictures except for this one, which is a tower of cream cheese with sauce drizzled over it.

72: KOYA-SAN

We headed up into the mountain of Koya-san for a night at a Buddhist temple. It was very cold and drafty inside the temple, and our portable heaters and heated tables were our saviors. That, plus the heated toilet seats. Our Buddhist dinner and breakfast were vegetarian, and they tasted better than I expected, seeing as how I am a big carnivore. We visited the Okunoin cemetery, the largest graveyard in Japan, which houses many of Japan's historical figures, including shoguns and samurai.

71: TORII, BAMBOO, AND MONKEYS

The Fushimi-Inari Shrine is the coolest shrine I've ever been to - it has 10 000 torii gates lined up in a row.

We also went to Sanjusangen-do, a temple which has 1000 life sized statues of the 1000-armed Kannon (the Buddhist goddess of mercy) surrounding a gigantic statue of Kannon, inside the longest wooden building in Japan. There are actually only 40 arms on Kannon, but each arm saves 25 worlds, so that is supposed to equal 1000. On top of the 40 arms, Kannon also has 11 heads. It's too bad we weren't allowed pictures in the temple, because it was an awesome sight.

The Arashiyama area, my favourite area in Kyoto, was beautiful and scenic. We went to the bamboo grove and to Monkey Mountain. It was an experience being surrounded by monkeys in the wild who kept screeching and running around with red butts. The little hike up to the monkey park was so hot and tiring that we needed to get gelato at a gelateria that won third place at an international gelato contest!

I received some horrible news from home today, and it made me think about how so many bad things are happening in the world right now. There is just so much death and destruction going on everywhere. Life is short, and it is so fragile, and anything can happen when you least expect it. I can't even fathom how people deal with all this devastation when it happens to their loved ones. Your whole life can change in the blink of an eye, and there's nothing you can do about it.

70: KYOTO

Nijo-jo gardens

Our goal for the day was to go to the castle in the morning, have lunch, and then go to two temples in the afternoon. We did the castle and lunch, but then we got sidetracked along the way to the temple with...MOCHI samples. There is a street in Kyoto called Sannen-Zaka with shops full of samples. They have samples of all kinds of mochi, and they even pour you tea to wash it all down. I was in mochi heaven.

We did eventually make it to one temple called Kiyomizu-dera.

I liked it because it was very interactive. We started off at the Tainai-meguri, which my guidebook kept recommending, but it also teased us with descriptions like, "We don’t want to tell you too much about this hall as it will take away from the experience. Suffice to say, by entering the hall, you are figuratively entering the womb of Daizuigu Bosatsu, a female Bodhisattva who has the power to grant any human wish." It was a fun and interesting descent into the womb!


Then there is the Jishu-jinja, "the Love Shrine", where you walk with your eyes closed between a pair of love stones which are set about 20 metres apart. If you miss the second stone, it means your desire for love will not be fulfilled. No one in the temple seemed to be doing this love exercise, but I decided to go for it. I closed my eyes, held my arms out in front of me, and repeatedly yelled out, "SUMIMASEN" ("Excuse me") so that the crowds of tourists would get out of my way. Here I am reaching the second rock successfully!

We never made it to the second temple because our food stops had delayed us by too much. We waited for the lights to turn on in the Higashiyama area at night, then it was off to curry udon dinner. We saw a real life geisha walking out of a temple tonight - I thought she was a fake one (most of the ones you see in Kyoto are tourists dressed up as geisha) so all I did was stare at her as she walked past me. But after she walked into a black unmarked car with several men, I found out that Andy had been told to move aside by the geisha's bodyguard. Turns out she was a real one!

69: ON EARTHQUAKES AND FIRE

We were lucky we managed to catch the 8:30am train from Nagasaki to Kyoto. As the train neared Kyoto station at about 2:45pm though, it stopped, just short of the platform, for about 20 minutes. We stood by the doors with our luggage ready, wondering what the hold up was. Finally, there was an announcement in Japanese: there had been an earthquake, and the train was to be delayed by 2 hours for its final destination of Tokyo. A chorus of discontent erupted from the front of the car; a group of teenagers who were heading home after a day at Universal Studios in Osaka would not make it back to Tokyo on time. People rushed by us, trying to call their loved ones on their cell phones, but the lines were jammed. Phoebe reassured us that it was just another earthquake. "There are earthquakes all the time in Japan. Thousands of earthquakes every year," she said. There had even been a few earthquakes in Tokyo the past few days, but those were just business as usual.

Once we checked into our hotel, however, we were glued to the TV as we discovered that it was NOT just another earthquake. This turned out to be the only hotel that had an English channel throughout our whole stay in Japan, and we watched on BBC in disbelief as news and footage of the earthquake and ensuing tsunami unfolded before our eyes. In the other room, Phoebe was watching the news straight from NHK, the Japanese station. From now on, there were to be no more funny variety shows on tv. No more soap operas. It was all news.

We watched the news for hours, unable to tear ourselves away from the tv. The afternoon slowly turned into night, and finally we headed out for dinner to have some FIRE RAMEN. The chef literally sets your ramen on fire right in front of you. He gave us a list of rules before he did this. First, we had to tie our hair back (especially bangs, because they could get singed) and wear aprons. We were not allowed to get up and run away, because oil would splatter all over our seat and we would then have to sit down on an oily seat. Lastly, we should not scream nor be afraid. Well, the fire was hot, my apron protected me from the oil splatters, and the ramen was delicious.

Why do I always have such bad luck with natural disasters when I travel? Although, I suppose it was actually good luck that I wasn't in northeast Japan at the time. Depends how you look at it.

68: NAGASAKI

Spectacles Bridge

Nagasaki is a lovely port city surrounded on three sides by mountains and on the last side by water. It was like a Japanese Vancouver. We spent the morning walking around the city and the afternoon in the excellent Atomic Bomb Museum (which even had a school girl's preserved bento box from the day of the bombing) and ended off the day at the Nagasaki Peace Park.

The Fountain of Peace is an offering of water to the victims of the atomic bomb. According to the inscription, the fountain sends up a sparkling spray of water in the shape of wings, evoking the dove of peace and the crane after which Nagasaki harbour was named.

Fountain of Peace

Peace Statue:

Words of the Sculptor:

After experiencing that nightmarish war,
that blood-curdling carnage,
that unendurable horor,
Who could walk away without praying for peace?
This statue was created as a signpost in the
cause of global harmony.
Standing ten meters tall,
it conveys the profundity of knowledge and
the beauty of health and virility.
The right hand points to the atomic bomb,
the left hand points to peace,
and the face prays deeply for the victims of war.
Transcending the barriers of race
and evoking the qualities of both Buddha and God,
it is a symbol of the greatest determination
ever known in the history of Nagasaki
and of the highest hope of all mankind.

Seibo Kitamura
Spring 1955

67: KUMAMOTO

Kumamoto-jo is one of Japan's most famous castles, and it is one of its largest as well. It lies in the centre of the city, and it is actually a reconstruction because the original was besieged and burnt down during a samurai rebellion.

66: ASO-SAN

Aso-san has the world's largest active caldera. The outer rim contains the five mountains of Aso; Naka-dake, the active volcano in the group, is where we went. It was negative six degrees and the wind was bitingly cold. Even though I was wearing seven layers, including two thicker sweaters, my fingers and face were frozen. I've been to a few active volcanoes in the past few years (Kilauea in Hawaii, Etna in Sicily), but this is the first time I was able to walk right up to the rim of the crater. That was really cool, but it did smell like rotten eggs up there.

Not terrorists in hiding - just taking refuge from the wind in the shelter