Takamatsu Washington Hotel Plaza

On the New Year's Day of 2010, I left Nagoya at 23:30 with a long distance bus to Kurashiki. In the original plan, I didn't mean to visit Kurashiki and Okayama, because the main destination of this time was Tottori on the Sanin Coast and Kurashiki is located on the Sanyo Coast. Honestly, Kurashiki was not so fascinating at first and Okayama look...

For a change in scenery, we head to Shikoku island, where no one seems to speak English and the tourists are all Japanese.
Our first destination is Naruto (yes, Bevan does watch too much anime) too see the whirlpools that form in the channel on every tide change.

We also visit the secluded Iya valley where we take a tourist boat tr...

JOINED THE CLUB

Well, I've taken the plunge and joined the Toyoko Inn Club. Toyoko Inns are already a great deal--cheap room with free breakfast and often a free gift when you check in. On a past trip, that's how I got that bright green and yellow washcloth and those monogrammed TYK socks. This time, it was a plastic foam slab in a wrap...

Slept well until I realized that without the heat, the temperature drops to zero. My back was frozen stiff this morning. But got to Zentsuji early nonetheless. Navigating local trains here has been really challenging--the times are correct but you never know if your small stop is on the way or a passed station. Zentsuji is famous for 2 things: b...

Got a good night's sleep at the hostel but I awoke to Jordan's alarm at 7AM. So I decided to get out to Matsuyama castle, which I originally was going to skip. The castle is on a hill that I feared if I climbed, I'd have no engery for Kompira-san. So I took the cablecar. The castle, though renovated, has been redone with original materials and i...

Started today early with a really filling and hearty minshuku breakfast. Totally new experience, but very nice. The owners had a log outside with Shitake mushrooms so I got to pick a few and then grill them up myself at the table. I'm sure minshukus exaggerate what's normal fare, but I'm fairly certain most of what I ate could be eaten in the Ja...

Kotohira-gu Shrine In Kagawa is one of the largest shrines in Japan, also known as Konpira-san. My Japanese friends told me Japanese should visit it at least one in their life time. My husband and me went there on the New Year day and drove from Okayama-Ken.We also pass the world's longest two-tiered bridge system -Seto-Ohashi Bridge. It was nic...

Okay, so I'm extremely bored at work and very excited about my upcoming travels. The result of that is a new blog entry. Enjoy. December has been a slower paced month for me. I've been saving my money for my trip to Southeast Asia and there hasn't been a whole lot going on otherwise. It's been getting colder around here and the lack of insulatio...

On Wednesday 23 April, I had my first shinkansen experience. OoooO i say! oooOoo!! I travelled from Fujiyoshida down to the next island down, Shikoku, to my friend Awa's (from uni) house. It was quite a journey. My shinkansen ride I must say, was slightly marred by the fact that the day before, someone had jumped out of an emergency window while...

It often goes without saying that Japanese and "Western" cultures are very different, and certainly there have been many articles from ALTs previously on that very subject. The reasons I came to Japan as a JET programme participant were to learn Japanese and to live in Japanese society. These two goals are somewhat intrinsically linked, however ...