Travel Blog Posts
July 28th 2006
hello. so, i have taken a few day trips in the past little while. i have also attended a few farewell lunches with members from work. first graham and i went to ikaho. it's an onsen town, but i thought it was more of a ghost town. to arrived to winding streets, with delapitated buildings, old cracked roads, and no one in sight but graham and i. this city is in the mountains, and know for its hot springs. there are 360 steps which cut through the city and lead up to a temple high in the mountain. there is also a cable car that takes you up the mountain to a lake, but we didn't have enough time to go there. i have also recently discovered that somewhere near ikaho, there is a penis (or ... read more
July 19th 2006
hello everyone. i have some exciting news about me. i got into architecture school. as such i will be moving away. i will be coming home around august 15th, then leaving shortly afterwards. i will arrange a party of sorts for myself. it will be a welcome home/congratulations/good bye again party. sorry, no pictures, i'll update here with stories again soon. yay me! i'm very happy. you may be wondering where it is i'm moving to. well, i got accepted to dalhousie, in nova scotia. so i will most likely be moving there. there's a small chance i may get accepted to u of t (very slim) and in that case i will proably move to toronto, but either way i will not be in vancouver for quite some time. best wishes to everyone. send me ... read more
June 14th 2006
i just got back from thailand. i was there for one week and it was great. i started off in bangkok. i arrived at midnight, got a cab, and made it to khoa san road where my hostel was. i was told to walk down an alley and i would find it. so i start walking, and walking, thinking to myself that this alley was really desolate. by the time i reached some army gaurds with guns i figured i was on the wrong alley. so i turned back. when i got to the street i was supposed to be on, the difference was night and day. there were still tourists up wondering the streets drunk, the buildings had bright neon signs, and venders were still open selling stuff. in my defence it was one in ... read more
June 5th 2006
hello family and friends. i am currently in thailand. yay!! some of you may have known that i was heading out to thailand for a week to visit my brother. i arrived late last night, and spent the morning shopping. my first impression of bangkok was that it was smelly, noisey, and dirty. the next morning i confirmed my initial thoughts, adding to the list, damn hot. but inspite of these seemingly negative characters, i quite like it here. i haven't seen so many foriengers (caucasians) for about 5 months now, and the shopping is unimaginable. so, i woke up early this morning, prepared to do cultural things, such as check out the grand palace. however, i ended up shopping for hours. i did develope a useful system. because it is too hot to barter well, ... read more
May 16th 2006
hello everyone!! i finally have the internet back, after all this time. i feel like i regained a limb previously lost. a sad but try case of my dependance to the web. so, i have been up to quite a lot, and learning a lot about japanese culture. first, i would like to wish myself a happy birthday! i am now 25, and was feeling a little blue, not so much for getting older, but i think more for the passing of time; it was somehow quite sad to me. then i went to work this morning and was showered with gifts by all my beloved students. this may be a slight exageration, but i did get a few gifts from the students. i got a plant, some flowers, wine, a homemade cd with music i ... read more
April 16th 2006
hello everyone. so, i have not written recently b/c i have no internet. i am sitting at the library right now. its a strange library. i:m on the edge of this huge grey brick building, that goes up like 6 floors, but all the hallways leading anywhere are blocked off. its like the heart of the library is protected from the general public. but why? i wonder what sort of thigs they could be using the large space for. my guess is paper work. it turns out japan revolves around paper work. how could this be? everything is so small and technological out here? common misconception. i shall explain with an example. i used to have the internet. then one day it stopped. sad but true, i no longer have the internet. so off me and ... read more
February 22nd 2006
hello!! i am doing very well here in japan, especially since i have discovered real shopping. i went to tokyo last weekend and it was so great. there was only one day, so we had to make the most of it. we were up by 8 am. ok, 8:15, and actually had some breakfest before rushing off to the train station where we caught a train to takasaki. we then hoped on a limited express train (not the shinkansen, because it costs 40$ more) which was about 20 minutes faster to get to tokyo. seeing as the ride was about 1 hour and 45 minutes, getting up at 8 to catch this early train started to seem kinda pointless. arriving in shibuya (an area of tokyo-its quite large) at 11:30 with a growing hunger, i was ... read more
January 27th 2006
i have now been here for almost 2 weeks. so i'm finding my way around a lot better. there's a busy street outside of our apartment which makes it pretty loud at night sometimes, but so far i don't need any ear plugs. last weekend i went to issasaki with graham and king (he works at the school with us and is from LA). issasaki is a town close to maebashi but has more night life. we went out for dinner at a funky little cafe which is well known for its black spaghetti. so graham got the sgaphetti and it was really black, not just a little bit black, a lot black. the noodles had even been died black by the sauce. it was a seafood spaghetti so maybe the sauce was made black with ... read more
January 20th 2006
So, I'm in Japan. getting here was fairly easy. i was on the plane for 10 hours, but it left a little late, and took longer in the air, but i finally got to narita airport. great landing, but the pilot decided to circle pretty much the whole way around the airport from where we started. i don't know why the airport was set up that way, but oh well, after 10 hours what was another 15 minutes. i then had to hop on a bus for another 4 hours out to maebashi where i could meet up with graham. my instructions for finding the bus station was walk straight. surprisingly accurate instructions. i couldn't take the shinkansen because it doesn't go by the airport, so i would have had to go into tokyo which would ... read more
Tot: 0.091s; Tpl: 0.002s; cc: 7; qc: 83; dbt: 0.0641s; 1; s:notus w:www (50.28.60.10); sld: 1; ; mem: 1.7mb
