Business Hotel Yamase Shimada

... the sweet first to sweeten the taste of the tea. Once you had the tea there was a precise manner in which to approach drinking it and how to drink it.<br><br>After that we headed back to the bus because we were all hoping to get on the bus early enough to head back to base and catch the fireworks show. Luckily for us the traffic was on our side and we arrived back not more than 10 minutes before the show started. In fact, Chrystal &amp; I were headed back to the ...

... had barricades and it didn't look at all like sand dunes. At night there was a float festival. Families young and old pulled the lit up floats along the road. There were children on the floats playing flutes and drums. We sat next to the drain, and it was super smelly, but the view was too good that we put up with the stinkiness. Back to school tomorrow, thank goodness it's going to be a 2 day week ...

... basically for each team's supporters, and man do they support there team. Drums, trumpets, anthems, giant flags, it was really fun to watch actually as they challenge each other from either side of the pitch. Second batsman up broke his bat and it went flying! That was cool, and then afterward he hit a home run sending it about 10  meters to the left of us into a crowd of kids with baseball mitts!

... Japanese, so its going to be great to have them around to learn from.  At the moment though now that i've found a place to settle, my days are filled with bike rides into town to play Tekken (i can't help it...), meeting people in the English teaching industry over here, setting up interviews, drinking, sleeping and eating lots of strange food. My major work starts in April so i get to work basically part-time until then! 

I was surprised to hear that the world's longest wooden bridge exists in Japan. It is Horai Bridge in Shimada, Shizuoka. It was a little bit far from my hometown, but I couldn't resist the temptation to walk on it. Especially, for it has a Guinness Record. Actually, I had never seen a Guinness certificate or inscription before, although I had tried a Guinness record myself in line dancing. Anyway, the bridge was 897.4m long and 2.7m wide, built in 1879 across Oi ...

Hoy nos hemos separado con Jan. No se que planes tenía él de ir a visitar un sitio donde hay gente peculiar y rara que fotografiar. Yo he preferido ir a Odaiba, ya que no se sabía muy bien que era y aprovechando esta mañana muerta de Domingo, ya me lo quito de encima. Hay que coger un monorail para llegar allí y es como una ciudad artificial construida a las afueras de la ciudad sobre la bahía de Tokyo. Odaiba es básicamente un espacio de ocio para adolescentes y ...

We head down to Shimizu for our first ever soccer game! Shimizu S-Pulse...lately in a bit of a rut, but today they won! After 90 minutes of hardcore passing, the team walked away with a well-deserved 1-0 win. Talk about edge-of-your-seat. Of course the neon-orange-clad soccer ...

Nothing like getting drunk and flying a kite. That's what our second matsuri was all about, on the way back to Fuji. We stopped off in Hamamatsu city (our first ever visit there) to check out the big kite festival! Many international events are also going on as the city has many different communities, including a large Brazilian community. Despite the rain, thousands of people gathered near the beach to fly giant kites that are ...

We take a short day trip to nearby Shizuoka to visit a small temple (reached by climbing 1159 stairs...or a convenient ropeway)...and then for some strawberry picking! We actually arrived too late, but some of the strawberry workers took pity on us and let us do it! 1000yen for 30mins of all you can eat strawberries! Combined we must have had over 200! It was a feat we cared less and less about with each strawberry we stuffed down our throats. Not very Japanese...

... a tea ceremony house where we learned everything about the ceremony and that particular place, it was great having Mochan with us!! To end up the day in Japanese style we went food shopping and Mochan cooked for us a vegi stew with udon and after dinner, before falling asleep in our warm futon we watched Laputa :)