I must be the luckiest girl in the world to have met Emi Sato and her family!!! Today, Emi's mother, Takako, planned a special little day trip for us to Hamamatsu, a city about an hour south of Shizuoka City. We started off this morning at about 9:30 and drove across a couple of different rivers (Tenryo was the most famous one) and through heaps of green tea fields to get to our first stop, a small museum in Hamamatsu dedicated to the importance of Fragrances...kind of random but really interesting. Inside the museum we got to go into a bunch of different booths and watch a 3 D show complete with a vent which gave the history and a whiff of all kinds of different scents from lavender to wisteria to ice cream. Sense of ... read more

We survived! (sigh of relief!!!) Mixing the travel styles of a 25 year old, poor backpacker and two 50 year old first class travelers (who might I add definitely deserve to travel first class after all of their hard work in life :), is a bit of a challenge but I must say that overall I think we did a really good job. Besides the small finger marks on my neck that still burn a bit to the touch, hahah, my mom, dad and I managed to traipse through the trains, buses and subways of Tokyo, Shizuoka and Kyoto relatively unscathed. And although the trip was a far cry from the luxurious vacation that my hard working parents deserve, all in all I think it went pretty well. I won't get into the nitty gritty of ... read more

Just a quick update on some of my recent whereabouts... There are festivals galore throughout August in Japan and while I did not make it to any of the big, famous festivals this year, I found a small one in Shizuoka, about a 25 minute bike ride from my apartment last Wednesday. It was held at a shrine that Dawn and I found about a month or so ago on some random exploration of Shizuoka. The shrine is tucked away at the base of a hilly, tree covered mountain and for this particular festival, there were hundreds of lanterns lit up specifically in memorial of people who lost their lives during World War II. The lanterns were fairly simple, but lit up all together they looked magnificent. Of course as with all Japanese summer festivals, there ... read more

Here are a few pictures of my recent walkabouts and random wanderings through Shizuoka. Last weekend Dawn and I decided to take the Shizutetsu (the local train) to a neighborhood near Ito Yokado (where we work) to just explore a little bit. We got off the train a stop after our stop for work and just started walking. We ran into all kinds of crazy things, Japanese Driving School courses, bamboo forests, Japanese neighborhoods, massive Japanese apartment complexes, driving ranges, a small park which led to a shrine (which I have included some pictures of), a huge cemetery and a street of traditional style buildings. We didn't know where exactly we were going and didn't have anything in particular in mind to find, we were just wandering and stumbled upon some pretty neat stuff. We ... read more

Yesterday I had a bit of an internal consumer crisis. You see I live about 10 minutes walking distance from the main shopping street in downtown Shizuoka and while that is a nice convenience at times, it is also really bad for the consumer in me. Every time I walk down the street (which is quite often because it is on my way to work and it is the center of life really in Shizuoka) I am forced to engage in an internal battle ---my desire to live a simple life vs. my desire to impulsively buy every Japanese knick knack that is for sale. Yesterday I was out shopping for some Japanese fabrics at a craft store and I ended up wandering into a shoe store where lo and behold I found the most ... read more