I'm off!

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Hello,

First of all thank you for visiting my travel blog. Happy Fathers Day Dad!

As many of you may know i have set sail to Japan with good old Lucy Hewes. We left Heathrow Terminal 4 on June 12th to fly to Dubai on our connection flight to Nagoya, Japan. Heathrow consisted of the usual hightened security... interogations, scanning your shoes etc etc. Once we got passed the men with rubber gloves we picked up some last supplies and had what we thought was our last western meal, an English brekfast for me, a Fishfinger sandwich with cheesy ships for Lucy.

The flight to Dubai was fine, 600 films and whole load of tv made it pretty impossible to get bored. The food was good too. As the lights dimmed to encourage everyone to sleep the ceiling of the plane turned to a sky of stars! We arrived in Dubai at 2am, too dark to see any of the lavish buildings fron the plane. Two hours wait in Dubai and a Chicken Quesdilla later we were on a plane to Nagoya, we were noticably the only western people on the plane. Again the food was good but this time we got lots of sleep as the entertainment was poor and the plane was half full.

We arrived in Nagoya at 6pm, it looked amazing, very mountainous. We had our photo and finger prints taken at the airport, lucy looking like the typical smuggler had her bag searched and we went on our merry way to Gifu on a train. The ticket inspector on the train did a little speach as he entered our carriage which ended with a bow, how polite! He had to wait a good 3 minutes for me to find my train ticket but showed no impatience, i love this culture.

Once we arrived at Gifu it was night time, the neon lights we blazing everywhere, lots of young buskers around, a very nice atmosphere. The weather was perfect, quite hot but with a breeze. In Gifu we met Yoshiko, Ed and their baby Art Hiro, they have been so kind and accomodating. After such a long trip it was so nice to have a bed and rest up for what will be an amazing month.

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