Pan Pacific Yokohama

... and am still fascinated with volcanoes, the trip to Mount Fuji was so great! That is putting it simply. We traveled up the volcano as well as visited Hakone to have a different view. Overall, it was a great day with wonderful weather. However, I am excited to be leaving Asia as my lack of previous interest in this area of the world proved to keep me unmoved to find excitement in my time there. Hawaii is next on the agenda! It will be nice to return to the good ol' USA.

... ago. Another thing that Yokohama seems to have that no other Japanese city seems to have, which is magnificent, is breeze. Today was still quite hot, but it is amazing what a different a small breeze makes. Old people were no longer dieing in the street, and passing birds were no longer bursting into flames. The first enclosure we came to contained a Japanese guy riding an Indian elephant. As far as ...

... of that paragraph was that I was nervous. I translated a children's story from english and did it in japanese. I basically pranced around with a zebra puppet on my hand imitating a elephant, alligator, and a giraffe. It was actually a lot of fun to be able to tell a story to the kids. I felt very japanese (which is surprising cause I don't really feel japanese back at home....especially with all the filipino nurses talking to me in tagalog and being super surprised when I ...

... and mostly likely not followed at all). I wanna make a prediction of how much I will spend and calculate all of it after it's all over. Planwise, I am quite green, but I have on the other hand booked a ticket to Bangkok, so at least the most important part of the trip is getting down, baby! During the next month or so, I will quietly plan my trip as much as I can without becoming anal. I can already feel it closing up, I am extremely excited!

... that the hostel was a dive & that it was full of skint Europeans & unsavoury Japanese men. I went down anyway to get the room sorted & we took it as the excuse to check out Yokohama with the most complex map of a city we have yet recieved on this trip! On our wander down to the harbour we passed through China Town, currently the biggest official china town outside of China. Obviously cleaner & nicer than China the main drag was still lined with ...

... temple as we had to catch a Shinkansen bullet train back to Tokyo. Never mind....we saw the walls outside - is that good enough for a temple tick?? Sat here in the airport lounge at Tokyo Narita waiting for the flight to take us on the next leg of our adventure - Australia. It promises to be awesome. Hope the room draws are kind over the next seven nights (if you know what I mean) although we have introduced rule 47 (Z) which states that "you can`t draw ...

... incident in a train carriage. Meanwhile, the man kept denying his part in the incident. But his denial did not last for ever. The police was to do a routine check Harumi-san's clothing items so that they could match up if the remnants of the skin cell with the man's. At this proposition, the man suddenly backed off and began to apologise profusely. I was wondering why the public did not offer help. Harumi-san told me that they had watched the incident like spectacle, but ...

It was a VERY early morning for a portion of our group today. Amy and her family (Judy and Bud), Cheryl (Erik's step-mom), and me all left the hotel around 6:30a.m. to do one of the ultimate Japanese tourist experiences... THE TOKYO FISH MARKET!! It was about 1/2 out by subway, and not at all what I expected. We were probably a bit late in order to see all of the selling and bidding of the giant fish... so we were mostly exposed to what was in ...

... over $100!!! Yet you could buy a half cantaloupe for $6. Explain me that!?! A very small bunch of grapes was like $8, a can of Campbell's chicken noodle soup was $8.30, yet a pack of 8 pieces of tuna sushi roll was only $3.80...which is obviously what I went with. I had a headache by now and decided to call it a day, so I took the subway back to Minowa. It was nice to get back to the hotel, take off my wet socks, and eat sushi. Despite the sushi being in a ...

... Buddhist temple in Tokyo. Whilst we were there hundreds of people visited the shrine to make their prayers and donations. It felt rude to take pictures there but everyone was doing it so I joined in and took a couple. Before entering people waft incense smoke over themselves as it supposedly has curative powers. The entrance to the temple, known as the Kaminari-mon (Thunder Gate) has a massive red lantern and 2 large imposing statue guards, Fujin and Raijin Gods of ...