This weekend we took a little day trip to Yokohama. There is a park next to Yokohama Stadium with beautiful tulip fields. Very enjoyable, even in the rain!
After we visited the park we walked to Chinatown and had lunch. The streets were just a sea of umbrellas!
Scallops in House sauce, Mapo tofu, and pork fried noodles - delish!!
We took an extended trip over the Memorial Day holiday (and my birthday) and visited the Tohoku region of Japan. Tohoku basically covers the northern third of the main island of Honshu. It's a big, beautiful region with the Pacific Ocean on one side, and the Sea of Japan on the other. We got a JR East rail pass that gave us unlimited use of the Shinkansen during our trip, so we were able to jump all around the area from Sendai to Hachinohe to Aomori to Akita. At the end of the trip we each tried to pick our favorite spot or activity and neither of us could pick just one. We loved everything about this trip! Our approach was to combine our Shinkansen trips with car rentals near the major stations. The Shinkansen gets you to the main city and then having a car allows you to easily and conveniently get out to the more remote locations. Just to give a feel for the travel times, it was about 2 hours one way on the train between the major cities (Tokyo to Sendai, Sendai to Aomori, Send...
We spent a wonderful 5 days exploring Shimane and Tottori Prefectures over the Labor Day weekend. We had an early morning flight to Izumo and so we decided the best option was to spend the night in the Hotel Villa Fontaine which is attached to the Haneda Airport. It turned out to be a very convenient way to make the flight that left at 7am. On our way to the airport, we bumped into one of Kimball's co-workers. When he heard where we were headed he told us his wife was from Shimane. He highly recommend we stop at Izumo Taisha, a very old and famous shrine (Top 100, for sure!). So, on his advice we made that our first stop of the day. It was a lovely place and by visiting we became educated on the story of the rabbit hopping from Oki Island to the mainland on the backs of many hundreds of sharks. Right at the end, the sharks got mad because they thought the rabbit had tricked them. So, they bit off the rabbits fur and left him to suffer in the saltwater and sun. Three brother...
One of the main reasons we applied to extend our stay in Japan until December, is so that we could enjoy one more autumn season. We had heard that Kenrokuen Garden (one of the Top 3 gardens in Japan) was beautiful in the fall so we decided to make Kanazawa one of our last trips. Kanazawa is known as the "little Kyoto", but we were surprised to find it is not "little" at all. It's quite a big city. It has a feeling of both modern and old all wrapped in one. We took the Shinkansen from Tokyo (our favorite way to travel in Japan). The Kanazawa train station has some very unique architecture. At the station we were able to get on a Loop Bus that made stops at many of the sites in the city. Our first stop was Higashi Chaya, a very nicely preserved Edo period district. It is also an area where there are many tea rooms and Geisha working there. We saw a women dressed in Geisha clothing running down one of the side streets - she must have been late to something. (Si...
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