Guest House Pirumirenge Hitoyoshi

... England and France beneath the English Channel). The next part of our journey was about two hours and we arrived in Sendai even more exhuasted than we did in Hakodate.
We were able to overcome our fatigue and head for the island of Matsushima, listed as one of the three most beautiful places in Japan. Our first order of ...

Hi Everyone, Man has it been crazy week. I attended the Rotary Kyushu District Conference in Nobeoka, Japan. The schedule hasn't been to hectic even though we leave at 8:00 am and return to our host families between 6 pm and midnight. Mostly its been been a good mix of sightseeing and vocational tours. Today we are visiting the local Coke bottling plant. Yesterday, we finally hit our first Onzen (Hot Springs). Don't have much time. More Later

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... Himeji actually, but I couldn`t say why. Maybe just because I didn`t feel like I was going to fall down the stairs at any second. And there were a lot of great bits & pieces that the lords (shoguns?) had owned while living there. We also visited an old samurai house, which was really great... just a rather posh version of a traditional Japanese house really. Lovely garden. Anyway, we`re off to the Japan Alps tomorrow. Yay!

Well, came down to Yatsushiro for a day to visit an old friend. Also explored the trendy castle ruins (Not nearly as big as kumamoto) There is no actual castle anymore, just the walls, moat and a shrine where the castle used to be. Also went to the awesome Japanese gardens there and chatted with the caretaker. Got mobbed ...

... gave us bas advice. They told us that there is a tourist bus that would visit our cave and a couple other spots related to Musashi in 4 hours. According to them tour would start at Kumamoto Castle. So we took the Tram there and checked the castle out. However we did not find a bus starting from there. Finally we went to the central bus station and bought tickets for the bus that would go directly there. It was about 3 PM then ...

... Aso, the largest active volcano in Japan. Its caldera was steaming when we went. It was so beautiful and breathtaking being so high up and so close to a crater. After a night in the country, it was off to the city again, Kumamoto. The city's most famous landmark is Kumamoto Castle. Great view from up top. Thank goodness I had ...

... lion, and a lamb). The "onsens" (hot baths) here are fed by hot springs, and are natural-looking, made with rocks and having small waterfalls. Our big exercise came in climbing Mt. Yufu, an extinct volcano. It isn't that tall (about 5000 feet elevation), but we had about a 3-mile trail each way, with about 2400 feet vertical elevation gain. We made it in about 2.5 hours, with great views of the valley below, with its small villages and numerous rice fields.

So tonight was supposed to be a relaxing night after work. Using the age old trick of convincing your friends to go ( I'll go if you go), the relaxing night turned into a "you want to go for a beer night", into a "you want to go to an all you can drink for an hour night", into a "lets get *********d night". We started off at a place callled Cowboy where it was just $13 for all you can drink for one hour. So after one of hour about 7 beers, 5 tequila shots ...

Today is my first of 2 days off so I signed up for a free Japanese lesson at the Intl center. The lesson went really well mainly because I met a Mexican woman who basically translated everythign that my Japanese teacher couldnt say to me in English. I learned basic introductions, but spent most of the time learning how to write/read the Hiragana and Katakana phonetic alphabets. I must say..its friggin hard. For me, its comparable to Arabic in the fact ...