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Published: August 9th 2007
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After a hectic week in Japan we are now relaxing in Frankfurt.
Before I write about our trip to Japan I will put a disclamer on this blog, the keyboards in Germany are all messed up! Z is where y should be, it took me ages to find the @ symbol so if mz spelling goes off, I am blaming it on the tools!
Also another note, cyper space seems to have eaten our last blog so if anyone has the text of the last blog saved in their internet history, if you could email that to us it would be appreciated.
Back to Japan. I won't go on about how good Japan was, we are on holiday, everything is good! Firstly i will say, Japan is cheap. Seriously, forget what you have heard about Tokyo, it is cheap to stay (if you look around) cheap to eat and cheap on public transport.
All up, apart from souvenirs we spent 130, 000 Yen so about $1,300 in 8 days for the two of us, including 8 nights accommodation, $400 on rail fares (that wasn't so cheap but included a ride on the bullet train).
We had booked
Turtles in Ueno Park
One thing you don't hear too much about is how many turtles there are in Japan. Every waterway and the occassional restaurant was full of them. accommodation in advance and were a bit aprehensive with what $25 each was going to get us in Tokyo. We had pretty low expectations, some walls and a door were about it but the accommodation was good, small by western standards but much more spacious than we expected.
Food in Tokyo was the real winner for keping costs down I think, eating how the locals eat in pokey little noodle shops saw us fed for $4! We were a bit unsure how we would go ordering in these as most didn't have english writing. We did pretty well in the end, the first nights one had a Vending machine type setup for paying, with pictures of the food and once paid you got a coupon to take to the counter. After that we ate at places with the famous, 'point at the pictures on the menu stratergy' and then only once had to resort to the 'we will have what they are having stratergy'. Other than noodle shops for dinner, we pretty much relied on the local 7/11 type shop for everything from sushi to Annas carrot and apple juice, which was actually pretty good (note from Anna, Dont forget
the icecream sandwichs, which were much like an icecream in a cone but with the cone around the entire icecream, and shaped like a sandwhich).
So in Japan the food was good and cheap although after a week we were left feeling a little lacking in sugar and fat!
The next thing we noticed (yes yes there are the crowds, rice paddy fields and other things you expect...) but what we didn't expect were turtles. Everywhere there was water there were hundreds of turtles! Not just turtles too, there was a surprising amount of aquatic life, huge frogs, turtles, birds, turtles, fish, turtles and turtles (note from Anna, there were TOO MANY MOSQUITOS!).
So back to what we did, after travelling we had 2 days in Tokyo, 2 days at Kawaguchiko near Mt Fuji and 2 days in Osaka. We have put a bunch of photos in from these places but the highlight was probably the fish markets at Tsukiji in Tokyo. We had heard to be there pretty early so managed to get there by 6am. Getting through the loading bays to the bidding area was an experience, you had to walk down narrow roads, some
only 1m wide and the vehicle of choice for fish traders was kind of like a Dodgem car, with a tray back and bumpers the whole way around, bumpers were covered in marks and paint so we tried to keep out of their way. At the markets there were stalls selling everything from snails to eels but the highlight was the large fish which appeared to be mostly blue finned tuna but we also saw yellow finned tuna and possibly a sword fish (something missing its nose anyway). The bidding room was filled with the huge, ice packed tuna and there would have probablz been 100 of these in the room at any one time. Thin slices of each fish were displayed with bidders inspecting these before buying their days fish.
After Tokyo we went to the sleepy, holiday town of Kawaguchiko which was nice and relaxing. The haze in the air was amazing and we only saw Fuji for a few hours even though it was only a few hours walk away. We managed to get a traditional Japanese room in our hostel, with tatami mats which was the highlight of our accommodation although without daylight savings, the
paper curtins meant a 5am wakeup.
Getting to Osaka was a bit of a challenge, see the photo for more details... So we had a bit of a relaxing time in Osaka, well as relaxed as you can get walking around in 38 degree temperatures and near 100% humidity! Osaka wasn't quite as cheap as Tokyo although that may have had something to do with my time spent in the electronics section of town! Oh well we can live off bread and water for the rest of our trip anyway.
Finally we finished in Japan with 15 Yen in our pockets and flew out for Germany.
Richard and Anna
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Dave
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Hey guys, good to hear you survived Japan and great to see some of your photos too! All these people travelling at the moment are making me jealous - stuck here in the cold! Look forward to the next update. Sorry I'm no help with your lost blog.