A year ago today I started training in Okayama in preparation for my current life. It's a little surreal to think that I have been here a year, but it also doesn't seem like I've been here that long either. This last weekend was a 3 day weekend for me because Tuesday was the Fall Equinox and a national holiday, so I ended up in Aomori visiting one of my friends who is also teaching in Japan. It's the first time I've seen him in over a year. Even though we live close together our schedules often conflict, so it's pretty [View Full Entry]

---

---

In Sendai we have this weekly newspaper called, Sendai Weekly. It's a lot like the Independent in Raleigh. It has ads for restaurants, concerts, coupons, and articles about things that are happening around or in Sendai. It's in Japanese but I have been going through it and practicing my Japanese and trying to learn new kanji and vocabulary. It is fall, or becoming fall, up in Tohoku, so most of the newspaper is about things that families can do together in the fall. This weeks Weekly was about Yamagata; which is the next prefecture over from Miyagi. There were ads for [View Full Entry]

---

---

Well, the end of the trip was drawing to a close. Amy and I got back to Taipei in the early evening and found our hostel pretty quickly. We stayed in the Taipei Travelers Hostel. It's on the 22nd floor of the electronics store next to the Mistsukoshi building. The owners were great and very helpful in getting us information and also just having fun conversation. I also discovered that the Travel Channel's 5 Takes: the Pacific Rim show stayed there. We ended up at the Fine Arts Museum that afternoon. It was really nice! The first floor was an architecture [View Full Entry]

---

---

The trip back to Taipei was a little longer and a lot funnier then the trip to get to Keelung. As typical foreigner behavior we tried to get to our platform early. Walking up to the ticket gates Amy put in her ticket....only to have it shot right back out the other end and onto the platform floor. It had to wait till a station worker came by to retrieve it for us. Luckily, a lovely old man came over and explained why we couldn't go through, and then we checked out tickets to see that they didn't have magnetic back, [View Full Entry]

---

---

So after my whirlwind tour of Taipei; which will be continued later, Amy and I headed out to Keelung. Keelung is a port city and it's a cheap hour train ride outside of Taipei. The college student at the Information Desk in Taipei booked us a room and then wrote down the address in chinese so that we could tell a taxi where we needed to go. Not speaking any Chinese was pretty difficult on this trip. I haven't been to a place where I didn't speak the language for a while now, so it was interesting and sometimes frustratingly funny [View Full Entry]

---

---

So, I finally have some time to write about my awesome vacation to Taiwan! The last month has been crazy busy at work and I haven't had that much time to actually sit and get stuff done. Here we go! Sunday So on Sunday, July 27 my friend and I started out adventure by missing our train to Narita. I was running down the platform and watched as our train left the station. It was an express and would have taken only a hour but we were lucky and a local came only 10 minutes later. After the long almost 2 [View Full Entry]

---

---

I finally made it to Zao-san! Zao is one of the top national parks in Tohoku and I am so glad that I got there! Zao-san is a sleeping volcano that has a beautiful crater lake that is said to have 5 different colors. The Japanese characters mean "5 color lake" I believe. The easiest way to get there is by car because the buses that run from Sendai and Yamagata Station run on an odd schedule and only stay for an hour (in the case of the bus from Sendai. With a car you can stay or move on up [View Full Entry]

---

---

When one thinks of Japan what do we think about? Ninjas, anime, comic books, and samurai of course. In modern Japan there isn't much in the way of Samurai anymore. Sure there are the splash of them in pop-culture and video games but they aren't much of anywhere else in my wonderings. Up in Tohoku you find a lot of history along with some pop-culture thrown into the mix. Kakunodate is the samurai spot in Tohoku. This old castle town has the most well preserved samurai houses that are lined behind beautiful black painted wooden fences. They are mostly free attractions [View Full Entry]

---

---

This weekend was Tokubetsu Kenshu and Sendai Amity was sent to Tokyo Disneyland as a reward for making "spirits". Basically it means we were given a free vacation and trip to Disneyland in exchange for losing our weekend and having to sit through a rather long and boring meeting. It's also suppose to be a bonding trip for your school. It'll give us more things to talk about than just our students. I had never been to Disneyland before. I was really excited to be going and to be going for free no less! Made the trip well worth it. We [View Full Entry]

---

---

I didn't even wake up to my alarm this morning. Instead I was wide awake @ 8:15am and just got my butt out of bed and started getting ready for a good days work or hiking and then relaxing in an onsen. I got a shinkansen to Furukawa and then rode out to Naruko Onsen station. It took about a hour and 20 minutes and around ¥2000 to be dropped off and after a few minutes walking around and orientating myself. The reason I wanted to come was to go hiking along the 4km trail along the Naruko Gorge. I had [View Full Entry]

---

---