We had a busy morning yesterday. After breakfast, we started our day by checking out Matsumoto Castle. It was a beautiful and fascinating building:

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I don't quite know where to begin. I've done and seen so much the past two days.

Tuesday we left the city of Tokyo in its famous Shinkansen bullet train, traveling to Nagano, home of Buddhist Zenkō-ji Temple. We were staying on the grounds of the temple itself, in a beautiful traditional style Japanese home. It had sliding doors, tatami ( Read more... )

This morning we got the train to Harajuku. We checked out Takeshita Street (you need to be careful with your pronunciation here), which is famous in Japan for it's fashion and trend setting.

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Last night we met up with our tour guide, Tyler. He's an American guy but he's lived in Japan for a few years and knows the language and the customs. He's a very nice guy. There are some other nice people in our tour group too ( Read more... )

Me and Natalie have had a lovely day so far. We have mooched around Ikebukuro. We started off looking around the Rikkyo University campus. It was a lovely building. It seemed very quiet, but students are probably all home for the summer ( Read more... )

So much for my plan to avoid jet lag. I unintentionally fell asleep about 4:30pm after being awake for over 27 hours. I woke up bright eyed and bushy tailed ready for a busy day. Such as shame it was 12:30am and the world was fast asleep! I didn't want to wake Natalie because I knew how tired she had been too, so I just lay in bed. Awake. ( Read more... )

Konnichi wa everybody ( Read more... )

Me and Natalie have made it safe and sound to Moscow and are awaiting our flight to Japan. Flight here wasn't too bad, but that was just the short one. Now for the long flight ( Read more... )

Me and Natalie are off to Japan on Friday for over 2 weeks touring the country. I'm so, so excited!

We're visiting Tokyo, Nagano, Matsumoto, Takayama, Kanazawa, Hiroshima, Kurashiki, Kyoto, and Yokohama. I'll hopefully be keeping my LiveJournal up-to-date on our travels and let you know all the exciting things I discover.

I've reuploaded my Hawaii video to correct the problem with the aspect ratio, so add your comments on it again please.

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