The Prince Park Tower Tokyo Minato

... are not fancy bikes - just one or three gear bikes that are easy to ride and usually have a basket in the front to hold all of your shopping purchases. Someone from my lab was nice enough to lend me a bike (although in the beginning I thought he was going to 'rent' it to me since 'lend' and 'rent' sound exactly the same). The first day he gave it to me he said "you can ride it from your house to school" and I'm thinking, ok ...

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... around Dundee, the gateway to the Oregon Pinot Noir region, were in order. Our first stop was the best choice and we wound up taking a couple of bottle of Rex Hill Pinot along for the rest of the ride to San Francisco. From there we headed down to Corvallis to have a look around since that is the hometown of some friends who live in Tokyo and it's also the home of Oregon State University. A pleasant town, but not a must do on the drive south. After that it was on to ...

... first cultural visit - really interesting temple type things!!!! After that is was on to the Tokyo tower (Eifel Tower looky likey) and despite the poor visibility made our way up to the viewing platform at 150M to get a birdseye view of the city. We had also planned on taking a boat ride across the bay but with the risk of that turning into another Dublin Special (for those that where ...

... worth a look. I was feeling a little worn out by this point so I popped into the nearest convenience store and bought a hot coffee, loaded with caffeine and sugar. Did the trick! I've never seen so much canned coffee. Revitalised, and conscious of the fact it was 3.30pm, I decided to embark on what was arguably my toughest challenge yet: Shinjuku Station. "That" station in Tokyo that handles over 2 million people every day. That's quite a statistic. I ...

... in Kiriyu." A: "Oh?? When??" M: "Oh, within the last 5 years." A: *frowning* "Not.... Stuart?" M: *JAW DROPS* *Starts laughing* How cool is that? How random is that? LOL Cracked me up as well. It was nice to pull an all nighter again, I always have fun when I do that in Japan. Was great to see Mike again. He's one of the few I've actually kept in regular contact with.. and makes me actually want to pull my socks up in keeping touch with other people.

... we got very very wet! It was funny too, because Tim forgot his umbrella. Of course, I shared mine with him, but I guess in Japan that means that you are a couple! I didn't really know that until later, haha, which made for some laughs. When we resumed class, everyone reported on their afternoons in Japanese and we concluded our Japanese lessons. I returned home as quickly as I could so that I could prepare for aikido lessons. Momo and I went ...

... from Ultraman, Gundam, Godzilla and Power Rangers and more. Everyone but Mark and I are Gundam fans, so they paid to get into a special part of the museum where they could live out their wildest Gundam fantasies. Not much else to say about that... The train ride to and from the museum gave a good view of some of the city outskirts, as we clumped along with nearly half a dozen tracks running parallel on either side. Upon an early evening return to ...

... Sapporo. We get a night train which leaves Sunday evening at 5pm and arrives on Monday morning at 6am. About 3/4 of the distance is covered on a Shinkansen bullet train and takes only 3 hours. The final 1/4 is on local trains and will take about 9 hours total. There is some difficulty getting exactly the right times and tickets but the JR staff guy is amazingly patient and helpful, making every effort to ensure we understand what we are ordering and that it is correct. With ...