Hotel Centre Inn Yonezawa

... the dragon's mouth, you can hear kind of a sonic echo sound (like the dragon is "roaring"). You don't hear this anywhere else in the hall. We saw a few women who wrote kimonos I guess to take some nice photos with the ancient buildings. We also saw a couple that looked like they just got married. The last complex we visited was Futarasan-jinja. It was less crowded so it had more of a peaceful feel. There were a couple of ...

Apres Sado nous nous sommes diriges vers Yamagata. Ce n'est pas tres loin de Niigata, mais en train c'est plusieurs heures et changements a travers les montagnes (surtout quand on en rate quelques uns au passage !). A Yamagata nous allons dans un hotel type occidental, rien de bien special, mais c'est pres de la gare et il est tard quand nous sommes arrives ! Le lendemain, visite de Yamadera, petit village tres mignon dans une vallee. Sur un des ...

... play a concert for the students which we got to listen to - it was turning into a week of culture. There was also a suprise party for one of the japanese staff (got to sing happy birthday in japanese and say lots of 'kampai's' - cheers). Although the japanese staff did not speak much english the other wwoofers spoke engligh and a little japanese so conversations often involved a lot of 3 language multi-way explaining and translating (it took 15 ...

Hi guys. This is the first dairy of my blog. Today, I'm going to write about Sakata which's a part of Yamagata. ---The fascinations of Sakata--- Population --98,599 (as of 2005) Location -- Northwest of Yamagata Speciality -- Beans(called "dadacya mame), cherry, pickles, apple, melon I've stayed in Sakata city for 10 days to get a driver's licence. I have to stay here 5 more days...lol

We did a longer road trip on Sunday, 10/7. We went north up the pacific coast to the end of the Joban expressway and then west, about ½ way across into the mountainous interior on the Ban-Etsu expressway. This is fairly far north, and very few non-Japanese tourists make it up here. Actually, it's still quite a ways north to the tip of Honshu (the main island of Japan), but much ...

So we get to one of our first relaxing places from the outside bandai-atami doesnt look that nice, probably due to its heyday being 15 years ago! The hotel we stayed at was called Kirakuya Inn not much from the outside but once inside it was really nice, it has 2 public onsens for men and women with many different baths and a sauna, and two private baths on the top floor observing the mountains surounding bandai. It was really nice, Michelle`s bag broke (also her hair drier blew up, we ...

... own. Chilled out in Onsen (lots of spiders outside in Kellys Onsen) then headed to downtown Sendai to find a hotel. First hotel we checkout was full, second had space and was more reasonably priced @ 3000 yen per person per night ($30). Sleeping in a real bed was great, but there was a nightlight that we could not turn off and lots of ads for TV porn and "evening companions". Upside though was complementary toothbrushes.

... how he managed to get a 2 second part, drinking beer in a YEBISU BEER commercial. It must have been pretty funny for the town to see their local school headmaster on a beer CM. Mike was ******* like a racehorse all night since he was sitting next to Mutsuo-san who kept eagerly refilling both Mike's beer and sake cups. They kept calling Mike a TSUU (sake specialist). We gave the Takahatas the remainder of the souvenirs from Australia - a kangaroo leather money purse and a kangaroo ...

... in the first place (original price ¥3500). Yamaguchi-san told the others with much glee that we'd come to Aizu Wakamatsu for the samurai festival, believing that is was on at this time. They all laughed, probably because very few gaijin would bother coming to Aizu at any other time. What a raucous bunch (they'd obviously had a bit to drink). I remember one pocketed my railpass after we told them all how we had unlimited train travel for 21 days. The headmaster guy, Takahata-san ...

I take back what I said about Honshu's trains looking more hi-tech than Kyushu's. Kyushu's trains are better in every aspect - more room, cleaner, more comfortable, less passengers, sexier uniforms (more like air stewardesses than train personnel) and quieter (passengers seem to talk a lot louder on the trains in Honshu). ****. All this travelling on trains has turned me into a *****er. Speaking of *****ing, my rant yesterday got me in trouble. After reading my diary, Dave ...