We were on the Shinkansen bullet train before 8am on Saturday and walked up to Himeji Castle at 9:30am. I checked in on Swarm and saw that there are free guided tours in English that are excellent, and I’d no sooner declared that we should find out how to get […]
Tag: japan
day 4 in Kyoto: Nara park, Kyoto Railway Museum, and karaoke
Friday morning about 9:45am, we set off from our AirBnB and discovered a place called Cafe Green Door in a residential area, just a couple blocks from our home, which was a nice change from the previous days’ meats on a stick for breakfast. We had eggs and coffee […]
day 3 in Kyoto: Hozu river boating, Rilakkuma Cafe, Nijo-jo Castle, and Bar Cordon Noir
Thursday, June 14, we rode a series of trains until we met Eric, a quad-lingual KKday tour guide originally from China who lives in Japan and was our guide for the “romantic” train taking us to a horse-drawn carriage taking us to a wooden boat taking us down the Hozu […]
Nikko National Park, Swallows baseball, and the Tokyo Tower
My son and I sat quietly for several minutes on one of the several hundred stone steps we’d climbed to reach the Shinto shrine at Nikko, a UNESCO World Heritage Site northeast of Tokyo. His sisters and mom were putting their shoes back on somewhere behind us. A mountain stream […]
turning 43 in Tokyo: sumo, shopping, and sushi
I awoke at 5am on June 7 and walked to the nearest 7-11 for breakfast of eggs and some triangular rice thing with meat inside before taking the train down to a sumo gym to watch giant men in diapers push each other outside of a dirty circle. There weren’t […]
our first (half) day in Tokyo
We landed in Tokyo on June 6 about 2pm and took the monorail, and then the subway, to our AirBnb in Ginza, deposited suitcases, and started exploring what felt like a new planet. Every man wore a white button up shirt and either navy or black slacks. Every woman wore […]