Late night, late morning, and the rain that had been predicted nearly every day in the weather report finally arrived. softlykarou went out with a friend to fetch breakfast, and then came back, ate, and we left just under the buzzer to allow the hotel staff to clean our room ( Read more... )

You can tell Japan is a high-trust society with good social cohesion because the elevators hang around forever but close instantly when you press the 閉める button.

I woke up late, so after showers and breakfast again at Lotteria, softlykarou and decided to go to Sanjūsangendō again. But apparently everyone else had the same idea, because when we got to the ( Read more... )

It's not just that our hotel is owned by a right-wing revisionist who thinks that comfort women were voluntary workers employed to help quell the desires of the barbarian Koreans, although he totally does and I read it in the propaganda in our hotel room desk. It's that the shower is terrible. And that's not just because its two settings are "off" ( Read more... )

Finally we had a day where we didn't really have a plan or a schedule that required we be somewhere on time, so we lounged around in the morning, had a leisurely breakfast at the Toyoko Inn--better than Sakura Hotel, not as good as Hotel Active--and then left right at checkout time to head to the train station. Due to the heat and various injuries ( Read more... )

As the subject says. My parents and sister came over to visit, and we ended up traveling all over the place. Tokyo, Kamakura, Nara, Kyoto, Himeji, Matsue, Izumo, Hiroshima, Miyajima...it was a ton of traveling. I probably walked over 100 kilometers, even with the times that we took public transit, and that doesn't count the extra effort expended ( Read more... )

So, last week I missed basically everything that happened on the internets because my parents were in town. If you don't remember my Kyōto entry, then I suggest you reference it again because we went all the same places. :-p The only difference was that this time, it was hot and humid instead of cold, and we walked everywhere ( Read more... )

All right. Now that I'm no longer sick, I can actually write about our Kyōto trip!

We were going to leave last Friday after softlykarou got back from work, but when we arrived in Hiroshima bus center she noticed that her purse was missing. It turned out that she had left it back in Chiyoda, where one of the station attendants had picked it up, checked the ( Read more... )