Hotel Yutori Shimada

... it. Although I'm thinking frying it up in tempura may be my method of choice.<br><br>After that we headed to Lake Hamana for lunch. It was a Japanese rest stop! We found a restaurant that served pork cutlet curry and then later found a place that sold crepe's and gelato. Yum! I had a crepe with gelato in it, sooooo yummy! It also satisfied my need to stop at the Starbucks that was there too.<br><br>After lunch we headed to the Dragon Rock Cave, which is a 1 ...

... 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! 

... It was Kawagoshi Iseki Ruin, which had been Shimada Post Town on the Old Tokaido Route. It took 25 min to walk up to the ruin, but all I saw in the ruin was just old houses and a river port office. There was a museum beyond the ruin, but I was not interested. Then I headed back for the train station. I still had two more destinations: Yui and Kanaya. I was supposed to catch a great view of Mt. Fuji and Suruga Bay in Yui and a stone-built part of Old Tokaido ...

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 ...

... each year. The sight is beautiful, even in the cloudy sky. It's fun to see the panic that ensues when kites fly off too far, or tangle with one another! Matsuri food is yummy as usual! They even sold the plain liquid candy that covers candy apples...It's all the fun of a candy apple, without the apple! We see a few new matsuri items (including a new matsuri rope game and a special "French" smoking trolley "L'art de ...

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...

We arrived in Shizuoka in the evening after a few hours train ride from the japanese alps. Mochan picked us up at the station with his small car and took us to his house where we had a couple of drinks before going to bed. The next day our "Japanese adventure" began :D Mochan took us to see mount fuji, we where ...