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Sunday, October 12, 2003
It's the end of my first week in Japan and so far it's been cool!
After a really uncomfortable journey from London to Tokyo via Frankfurt, I arrived early Sunday morning. Me and my brother spent the next 3 days wondering around Tokyo - we ate sushi, played games, pachinko and ping pong, visited cool areas and generally had a lovely time. Tokyo is really brilliant and we're going to visit it some more this week 'cos I love it!
On Tuesday night we took a night bus (8 hours) down to Kyoto and spent 3 days visiting temples and zen gardens, hiking in the mountains, walking around shrines in the woods, generally looking about. It's a lovely city, full of new 'flashing neon' buildings and old wooden temples, high tech cars and little old men on push bikes, fast food western style (McDonalds) and fast food Japanese style (noodles, sushi...). We spent one night in a traditional ryokan (tatami floors, futons, zen garden...), another in a less traditional one and one camping out in the mountains by a stream. It was then that we met the legendary mountain man - a Japanese tramp who's been living there for 3 years! He was really nice and suggested where to camp to avoid the wild boar. Phew - if he hadn't we'd have had some interesting visitors in the night! We then took local trains back to Tokyo which, whilst we got to see lots of Japan, was such a long journey (10 hours) with so many changes (8) that by the time we got back (11pm) we were knackered! It was all part of the great ronin adventure though so we were happy.
Everything is so expensive that our grand plans of Nara, Wakayama and onsen have been amandoned in favour of having fun in Tokyo :-)
Anyway, I'm being brief because I don't want to spend my holiday typing on a computer, I want to get out and see things! I'll tell you everything and show you my pictures when I come back.
See ya!
.....posted at 2:56 am permalink
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