Blogs from Hokkaido, Japan, Asia - page 31

I have now officially arrived in Japan. I arrived on Sept. 2 at approximately 9:00pm. Naoko picked me up at the airport and we took a taxi to her home. My flights went well. I got layed over in Chicago for two hours but was still able to make my connecting flight in Japan by about twenty minutes. It was close but I made it, and so did my luggage. I'm enjoying staying with Naoko. She's taken me to Sapporo station and we went shopping. I was able to get an electronic dictionary so that I can understand what words mean and can communicate better. Naoko is teaching me how to use the subway to get around so that I know what tickets to purchase. She also helped me exchange my money so I had money ... read more

Last night I went to my first Japanese baseball game. This guy I knew got four tickets to the game provided by the manager of the home team. The home team around hear is the Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters. So all I knew was I was about to cheer for a team who loved there ham and wasn't afraid to fight for it. I hopped in a cab in order to meet them at the stadium. I said that I wanted to go to the Sapporo Dome and said baseball while I did the universal bat swinging gesture. We were off and away. Apparently the Sapporo Dome is close to my place. When I pulled up in the evening twilight I could see this futuristic marshmellow looming in the sky. I have always liked the Sapporo ... read more

I am in Japan!!! A long way from Adelaide, Australia, but here I am in Shizuoka for a year teaching at an English Kindergarten while seeing and experiencing as much of this crazy, mixed up, amazing country as I can! So to make this blog a bit more exciting to write its gonna be an A-Z of what Marissa and I did in our 4 day visit to Hokkaido. Not that Hokkaido wasnt exciting, it was, its just you get sick of writing 'and then we did this and then we saw that', and come on lets admit it, most people just look at the pictures anyway!!! A is for Air! It was fresh, clean and you could even see the stars, the mountains and blue sky- no haze!!!! B is for Beer We were in ... read more

Sapporo Tokyo is an amazing city with so much to see and do and crazy fashions to be amused by, but to tell the truth...I"M OVER IT...the mass crowds, the subway, the enormousness of everything! So it was goodbye to Tokyo (new blog coming) and hello to Hokkaido - Japan's second largest and northernmost island. We had planned this trip just in time for the Sapporo Summer Beer Festival. It took about 1 hour 40 mins to fly, and then we caught a train to Sapporo and another train or two to our hostel, Ino's Place. The hostel was very nice and homely, but lacked air-conditioning. We dumped our bags, met some Norwegian girls in our dorm (one was very strange and didn't talk but just took photos of us without asking or saying what she ... read more

Well, to begin; Sophie, Viviane, Ninon, Petar (Bulgarian boy who, because he has such a hard name to pronounce we ended up calling him Charlie. He's Charlie, we're the angels) and me all met up in Shin Osaka on February 10. We took a train to go to Fukui Ken, this is the harbor where ferries leave for Hokkaido and we took a bus to get to the harbor. After waiting for a while, we got on to the Ferry, which to describe accurately is a CRUISE SHIP! Its really pretty, kung baga, "Pasensya na Super Ferry, tablado ka, Di na kita trip" It has a big shower room thats Japanese style with a big hot tub like an ofuro. It's actually the same as the shower room in the university, but of course this one ... read more