Goodbye, Japan. Goodbye, everybody.
The last two weeks have gone so quickly. We started in Tokyo, stayed there for a week. We saw museums and temples and all the 20-year-olds in traditional dress for coming-of-age day on the 21st.
Tokyo is vast and shiny and expensive-looking and the majority of people look like they've just walked out of a fashion magazine. We went round and round the city using our rail pass and saw the Edo-Tokyo museum, the national museum, night from the top of Roppongi hills, and many other wonders.
We went to Kyoto for a few days and stayed in a small Ryokan in a tatami room. We slept on futons and talked with other travellers. In Kyoto you can hardly help tripping over Culture as you walk out your front door. We saw huge temples and five-story pagodas, imperial palaces and a costume museum which demonstrated the finer points of courtly Heian-era dress through dolls in tableux from the Tale of Genji at a scale of 1:4.
We stayed one night in Nara and saw the Giant Buddha.
We stayed a week in Osaka and had a whole day when we did Nothing, just for a change. We saw the most beautiful aquarium which included a whale-shark in its collection. Also giant crabs, seals, otters and sunfish, which are the most confused-looking fish I have ever seen.
We have eaten sushi and tempura and japanese pancake-pizzas and kare-katsu and octopus-balls and many things I haven't a clue how to spell but which were delicious.
There were several things I had heard about Japan from reliable sources but hadn't quite believed, and which I now know are quite true. Many toilets really do have heated seats and wash your bottom for you, and have a special button to make flushing noises. The school uniforms are just as they look in manga. Everyone really does bow, at carefully calculated depths depending on who its directed at. There really are capsule hotels. There really are quite loony gameshows screened at 2am. The train carriages of shinkansen trains really do line up exactly with the marks on the platform when the rain arrives so that passengers can file on neatly from their queue.
This afternoon we return to China, and I won't be able to read any replies to this post unless the government has unbent a little and unblocked LJ, which is quite unlikely. But I can be emailed.
Chris says hello, happy wombling, see you all again soon.
Tokyo is vast and shiny and expensive-looking and the majority of people look like they've just walked out of a fashion magazine. We went round and round the city using our rail pass and saw the Edo-Tokyo museum, the national museum, night from the top of Roppongi hills, and many other wonders.
We went to Kyoto for a few days and stayed in a small Ryokan in a tatami room. We slept on futons and talked with other travellers. In Kyoto you can hardly help tripping over Culture as you walk out your front door. We saw huge temples and five-story pagodas, imperial palaces and a costume museum which demonstrated the finer points of courtly Heian-era dress through dolls in tableux from the Tale of Genji at a scale of 1:4.
We stayed one night in Nara and saw the Giant Buddha.
We stayed a week in Osaka and had a whole day when we did Nothing, just for a change. We saw the most beautiful aquarium which included a whale-shark in its collection. Also giant crabs, seals, otters and sunfish, which are the most confused-looking fish I have ever seen.
We have eaten sushi and tempura and japanese pancake-pizzas and kare-katsu and octopus-balls and many things I haven't a clue how to spell but which were delicious.
There were several things I had heard about Japan from reliable sources but hadn't quite believed, and which I now know are quite true. Many toilets really do have heated seats and wash your bottom for you, and have a special button to make flushing noises. The school uniforms are just as they look in manga. Everyone really does bow, at carefully calculated depths depending on who its directed at. There really are capsule hotels. There really are quite loony gameshows screened at 2am. The train carriages of shinkansen trains really do line up exactly with the marks on the platform when the rain arrives so that passengers can file on neatly from their queue.
This afternoon we return to China, and I won't be able to read any replies to this post unless the government has unbent a little and unblocked LJ, which is quite unlikely. But I can be emailed.
Chris says hello, happy wombling, see you all again soon.