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We were sitting at a table outside a small beach storefront drinking a beer and eating a corn on the cob. It was a nice afternoon and the sea was calm, gently brushing up on the sandy shore and retreating back into the bay-like water as if nothing ever happened.  Fukuoka tower was behind us […]

Today we took a ferry over to Miyajima Island, which has a famous temple and arch, and a lot of tourists. There is a mountain you can climb (Mt. Misen), so we climbed it, taking the long way through a National Park and avoiding all the tourists. Until we got the top. Because of course

I sat staring at what appeared to be giant red balloons in the shape of male horse genatalia.  The score was 3-0 in favor of the visiting team, and the Hiroshima Carp were messing up. Exasperated baseball fans hemmed and hawed at a bad call from the first base umpire, who called the last out

We arrived in a small city called Himeji after taking the bullet train from Kyoto. The rain had stopped during the night, but the streets remained wet and the dull daylight shimmered off puddles on the city streets. There isn’t much in Himeji except two major things: the Himeji castle and the Kokoan Garden, both

Today we mostly sat around waiting for our laundry at the inn and watching television. You see, the washer/ dryer combination at the inn apparently takes a whopping 4-5 hours to finish. Yes, you heard that correctly: 4-5 hours to get washed, and in the same silver vestibule get dried. Had we known about this

Kyoto is a special place. It took me only 30 minutes after arriving at Kyoto Station to come to this realization. It is an old city and has too much character to describe adequately in writing. It was once the capital of Japan for over a thousand years. There’s shrines and temples scattered all around

We said goodbye to Tokyo today and hopped back on the train headed west. It was a 3 hour ride to Osaka and it went by fairly quickly. The bullet trains are something else. You can get very far very easily in Japan, and having the rail pass makes everything super simple too. You just

We woke up early and checked out of the CITAN hostel and made our way to the Tokyo Central station. We were going an hours train ride west of the city to hike a popular mountain called Mt. Takao, which promised views of Tokyo along with views of Mt. Fugi, an active volcano that serves

We walked 10 miles around Tokyo today and saw the sights. Here is the day in pictures:

We woke up and made our way back to Hakata Station to catch a high speed bullet train to Tokyo. We found the right track and train pretty easily and were soon soaring along at nearly 200 mph. The trains look like they are from the future and have a long nose at the front