Sayonara Japan! Hello Stinky Shanghai!

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We're back in China and after Japan, it is a real shock! Japan is so clean and civilized, and the people there are lovely and friendly. It's so clean, we saw people scrubbing the pavements and road signs!

After the sumo, we went to Kawaguchiko, which is a lake near to Mount Fuji. As we were leaving Tokyo, we could see the mountain from the train, but we weren't sure if it actually was Mount Fuji because it is very shy, but it turned out that it was! We were super lucky because when we got there we could see it all afternoon and evening and in the morning, it was still there!! We had a breakfast picnic by the lake looking at it - amazing 😊 We spoke to someone who had been there 2 days before and all they saw was cloud - haha! We went up a cable car for even better views and got millions of photos.

Then, we went to Hiroshima for a day (on the bullet train again) which was very interesting. We went into the Peace park and the peace museum (which was only 35p - cheapest thing in the whole of Japan). The museum was amazing - loads of information. Did you know it was Albert Einstein that signed the letter persuading the American Government to start researching into nuclear weapons? There you go - you learn something new everyday! There is a building there as well, which has been left exactly as it was after the a-bomb hit, it's now called the a-bomb dome. I got lots of photos of that too.

After Hiroshima, we went to Kyoto, which was lovely, much nicer than Tokyo, more like what I imagined Japan to be like. We went to the international manga museum and read some manga. We explored lots of temples and gardens and zen gardens which is basically just stones that have been raked a particular way. We also saw some Geisha girls 😊 We spent 2 nights in a traditional Ryokan (Japanese inn) which was fun, but we had to sleep on mats on the floor, Matt was not impressed that we were spending 50 pounds a night to sleep on the floor.

We went on a couple of day trips as well, one to Himeji to see the castle which was amazing, but it didn't look very old. We think they preserve things a bit too well in Japan, everything looks brand new even though it's been there for hundreds of years. Then we went to Nara, where there are loads and loads of deer. We fed them some biscuits then we went to Todai-Ji which is the biggest wooden building in Japan (possibly in the world, I can't remember now). There is a massive Buddha in there, then at the back of the building, there is a little tunnel which is the exact same size as the Buddha's nostril. All the Japanese people were crawling through it (or getting their friends to pull them through it) - if you get through you are on the path to enlightenment. Matt had a go, he got stuck.

Then, it was back to Osaka for a night before we got the 48 hour boat ride back. It was great on the way back, Japan wore me out so it was nice to do nothing but eat, read and sleep for 2 days! Oh and get raped in the ear by a man in a boiler suit. (He was taking our temperatures in case we had swine flu)

Tomorrow, we are going to the Russian embassy to see if they will give us a visa, so everyone keep their fingers, toes and everything else crossed!

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Comments

[sandra smith]

japan
Japan is deffo on my list ............. clean sounds good!!