ANA Hotel Matsuyama

... clouds. But even more hair-raising was looking ahead to the actual peak of Ishizuchi, still towering far over head and far off in the distance.<br><br>Down the other side of the peak was another set of chains back to the main path and we continued what would prove to be an increasingly steep and difficult climb to the top.<br><br>There was one easy section not long after the first set of chains, where the forest opened up to open fields of low-lying bamboo. It was ...

... continued all night long. And when I say all night long I mean it didn't stop until the next morning around 6am. This happened the whole long weekend and though Jess can sleep through anything I cannot and barely got a wink of sleep. I didn't let this stop me from enjoying the festival though.<br><br>On Saturday night was the big smashing ceremony and that was really the highlight of the festival. It was amazing how many people came too, from all ...

... so that I can regularly update you with some photos and information!<br><br>I will try and backlog later, adding in Tokyo photos, and some other events.<br><br>For now, just a quick glimpse into life in Hojo!<br><br>(More photos to come....more of our apartment (after I finally bought some curtains), my school, etc!)<br>

... the west passed through some awesome gorges and landscape. Again, lack of development has left the river beds rocky with boulders and mountains free of rice paddies. Of course there are roads and dams, as everying in Japan, but it's blissfully free of concrete structures dotting the terrain. We actually passed for a period of time a marathon running the same route our train was on. Forty kilometers through some rugged ...

Ok, this is a real entry this time - real thinking and real rambling. I talked to some of you when I was back in CA and I heard some comments that i'm running out of things to talk about here. ME? Ever run out of things to talk about? and to that I say HA! The reason why the last few have been rather terse and shallow is that I've had no time to really work on making entries. I've decided to take the Level 3 Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT). This is a test ...

... Ashleigh thinks it's cute, tho I can tell that she's a little embarrassed since she doesn't want me to bring my knitting onto road trips and such. I guess it is a little odd for Japanese men to be doing knitting, but it's cool anyways. I've decided that I'm going to cut down (for now) on knitting and focus more on learning Japanese.

... ve sufficiently said nothing specific, I'll drop the topic. There's a lot of things about myself that I've kinda said "ooooooh" after being here for almost 4 months. I'm sure that a lot of it has trickled down from growing up with my mother, but I think some of it is innate. Here's a list of things that I've noticed: + my love of small handheld technology + my need to take pictures of everything + my obsession with animation + my enjoyment in clever ...

... checked out the arcade down stairs. There were some amazing gamers who had clearly spent too much time there. We got the bus to the hostel of the other night. We were booked into the exact same room as the other night. It was going to be a really early start tomorrow we needed to check out about 5.30 ideally to get the first of 6 trains at 6.34. Unfortunately they wouldn't budge on check out which was from 6, so we were gonna have to cut things fine, get a taxi and hope we were there in time.

... and of course some beer. The next morning we headed to Itsuku-shima-jinja Shrine, located on Miyajima Island. This is a huge 900 year old shrine on an Island off Hiroshima. It has the world famous giant red arch/gate in the sea that you see on every ad/brochure for Japan. We took the ferry over and it was really nice. You could see the big red gate from some way out. When we got there we went for an old wander around and found that the place is over run with wild deer. They were cute ...