Blogs from Chiba, Japan, Asia

I had an unexpected stopover in Japan on my way to meet MaryAnne in Kuala Lumpur. I left Salt Lake a day earlier than I had originally expected, in the event of a flight delay and I was really happy the delay happened in Japan as I had been hoping for a visit to this beautiful country for quite some time. It's quite easy to get around here. Most of the stranded travelers stayed in a hotel called the Narita Excel Hotel near the airport. There is a free shuttle from the airport, a free shuttle to get downtown and it was less than $80 per night. From the shuttle stop downtown, the Naritasan Shinshoji, a Buddhist temple, was within walking distance (about half a mile) but getting there required walking in all sorts of directions ... read more

Hello from tokyo. It's been a few days now since the earthquake and the situation here seems to be constantly deteriorating. The first day after the quake, everything seemed like it was back to normal. Now nearly a week has past and the city seems to be shutting itself down slowly, bit by bit. Looming over everything is the threat of the nuclear power plants which are spewing out radiation a short distance to the north of here. There are currently rolling blackouts throughout the area to conserve energy. Trains are sporadic at best and quite often simply stop running for hours at a time. I am still going to work, but my commute has become the hardest part of the day. The food and supplies situation is getting pretty bad as well. A few days ... read more

Hi everyone, first of all I should just say that myself and everyone I know is 100% fine and reasonably unaffected by yesterday's earthquake. In my prefecture, we had an extremely bad earthquake, but it falls well short of anything that could be called a disaster. Spare your thoughts and prayers for the northern part of Honshu, about 350km north of us, where the loss of life and destruction of property is horrifying. As for me, I am now working in an english conversation school. I know I had promised to keep the blog up, and I am planning to update in the near future on what my life is generally like at the moment, but for now I think I will just talk about what happened yesterday. It was a pretty average day and I ... read more

Destination: Tateyama, Chiba Prefecture (Distance from Tokyo: 115km, approximately 72 miles) Map　→　 (http://www.jnto.go.jp/eng/location/regional/chiba/minamibousou.html) Date: August, 2007　 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- After dinner, the owner of B&B told us there would be a firework festival in a neighbor town and would be able to see it from a beach nearby. Great! We didn’t expect there was a firework festival while we were staying. What a lucky night! So we walked down to the nearest beach. We had to kill some time till the firework festival kicked off. So we got a couple of bottles of local brewed beer, Awa Beer (http://beer.awa.or.jp/), from a convenience store. Their ale type beer was so smooth and have such a pleasant flavor of hop. We sat down on the beach with the tasty beer in our hands. It ... read more

Destination: Tateyama, Chiba Prefecture (Distance from Tokyo: 115km, approximately 72 miles) Map → http://www.jnto.go.jp/eng/location/regional/chiba/minamibousou.html　 Date: August, 2007　 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The very first post of our story goes with our first trip to Tateyama of Chiba prefecture. We had this 2-day trip in the summer of 2007 (oh gosh, 3 years ago! Time flies so quickly!). Tateyama is located in the southern part of Chiba which is not so far away from the central area of Tokyo. But the area shows you a variety of faces Tokyo doesn’t have. Beautiful beaches, magnificent landscape, tasty food, friendly people ,etc. The atmosphere is so relaxed. You hardly imagine you are in a neighbor province just 2-3 hours away from one of the busiest cities in the world. “ Let’s get the h... read more

So, It has been awhile since i have written, my apologies. I unfortunately was having some computer issues and had to reformat my hard drive... =/ anyway... I started my first full week of classes last week! I am really enjoying the Japanese classroom, even more so than the American alternative. The pace is fast but not too fast that anybody gets left behind. I feel like it's just the right level of comfort that I need. Also, the senseis that I have are very friendly and helpful. So I went to a few different places over the last couple of days. I went back to Harajuku (of course), Asakusa, and Tokyo just recently. Harajuku: It was fashion night in Harajuku and I had a blast! I went with some friends of mine, and we shopped ... read more