Hotel 1-2-3 Shimada

Today's tour agenda included being at the bus early in the day... ugh... and then heading south to the Shizuoka Prefecture. We went to the Greenpia Makinohara factory, then to the Dragon Rock Cave (Ryugasido) and Kakegawa Castle.

It took over 2 hours to get down to the factory. The area is rich in green tea and apparently the people in that area have very low occurrences of stomach cancer. We took a tour of the factory to see the process of making the ...

Happy Golden Week! I remember this time last year I went home. I can't believe it has been a year since I started working here in Nagoya. We are on Golden Week holidays in Japan at the moment. Golden week is a week of public holidays including Children's Day, Greenery Day, Constitution Day and Emperor's Birthday. The kids had a whole week off, but teachers had to work 2 days. It was nice though to have ...

... 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!

... of busy stuff. A friend named Derrek has been the major help in this move and arranged for me to stay with some guys he works with. They had a spare room and let me stay until i found somewhere to live. Zach is Australian and is from Tasmania, Corey is American and from Philly, and Shingo is Japanese and believe it or not he's from Japan. These 3 dudes are way cool and chilling with them while i found a place was so much ...

... wooden building and designated as a UNESCO's World Heritage. Another is Todaiji Temple Daibutsu Hall, which is the world's largest wooden building. And Horai Bridge is the world's longest bridge. Japanese should be prouder of the wooden architectures. Shimada station had a tourist information in front of the north exit. It was lucky to get a map and brochures there, because I had no guide. The office lady gave me details about Shimada sightseeing, although I ...

... mi primera comida en japonés solo. Encuentro un restaurante sin comida de plástico para señalar pero con alguna foto en la carta. Me tomo mi primer arroz con curri, que es muy típico aunque en realidad, es una receta Tailandesa. Cuando me encuentro con Jan, que habíamos quedado en el Hotel para tomar el tren a Hamamatsu, le pregunto que qué ha comido él. - Finally, I went to McDonals - he said- Vaya decepción, a la primera de cambio ya se me viene abajo y recurre a ...

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 ...

... as well as some of the usual fare...including toy guns for sale...at every matsuri we've been to, you can always buy toy guns! Some look very realistic too...A matsuri just isn't a matsuri without a gun! This matsuri was really fun! And everyone was decked out in their festival wear, right down to tabi, and many played trumpets and drums. Apparently there is only one official tune to play for this matsuri though, haha...

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...

... looking at this famous mountain while our feet were being massaged by a machine o_O then we visited a small edo style village where we met some local people and a huge dog!! We had some ramen then we went to a second hand anime and manga shop :) we took some pericura and had some onigiri! He then took us ...