Tottori City Hotel

... watch the latest fashion victims.
So, our impressions of Japan after 10 hours here:
- The incredibly friendly and polite people;
- Amusement at the vending machines on every street corner. Beer, chocolate, hot noodles, coffee, cold tea...
- The Japanese guy who asked `Australia, Australia?` and then proceeded to jump around like a kangaroo and then imitate a koala (and ...

... which is a well-journeyed train as you can see from the picture below. I wouldn't say that it is a particularly comfortable train, but its retro-flavor will make you feel like you have slipped back into the good old days.

So, what is it exactly that makes Tajima beef so good?

According to Mr. Okamoto, one of the workers at the ranch, its superb and distinctive regional bloodlines passed down for many years are the primary reason for the excellence of Tajima beef ...

... an English menu, and ate there. It was a nice dinner, a few bits of sashimi, some edamame beans, some yakitori etc. We headed back to our hotel through the constant rain to our hotel. Tottori is a fairly nondescript town and we were there on Sunday which meant that many shops were closed, which made it even more boring and provincial. It kind of reminded me of Slough in its pure drabness.

... Britain`s without being anywhere near as good.) The museum and gardens were quite good, my favorite was seeing all the different Japanese gardens. These are very different to Englsih gardens, as they are ornamental ie you do not actually walk on the gardens just look at them from the inside of the building. There is a lot of attention to detail spent on the arranging of all the different features of the garden e.g trees, rocks, plants and water ...

... my childhood home in Jacksonville. I also counted 17 different places that I have stayed. I have enjoyed living in Tottori as the prefecture is blessed with a beautiful coastline and green mountains with not many people. The people are nice too and I am sad to be living the great friends that I will miss. It was a very tough decision for me to make, to stay in Tottori or go back to Oregon. I love both places very ...

... Tokyo December 21st to January 2nd I will stay with several friends and hang out and see a few sights around Tokyo. I will return via Osaka to see another friend. 3rd Leg - Tottori January 2nd to 9th - Not a real leg but I have to pack up my goods and send them pack to Oregon and clean my apartment and say good bye to my friends. 4th Leg - Thailand January 10 - Fly to Bangkok. I am ...

Greetings to the first entry of my big trip. It is ten days before I start the first leg of my trip to Kyushu. It will be my second visit to Kyushu as the first one was in 1995. I am planning to go to Fukuoka and then head to Yufuin in Oita prefecture and then contrinue down to Kagoshima and onto Nagasaki. The trip is part of the plan to visit all the prefectures in Japan which will be down to 1 after the trip leaving only Fukui..

... to change my mind again, and I did this fairly quickly after hunting down a good travel agency in Osaka. I then had to go to the Chinese Embassy and apply for a visa, again something that didn`t take too long. I had the rest of my trip mapped out now which felt good, and I`d decided to head back to Tokyo for a week as I missed the buzz and excitement that is absent in Kyoto. I was also looking at it as something of a trial run - if I ...

... can you help it when your whole life is surrounded by music!? It's great! :) Living in Japan has been interesting lately. Yesterday and today we had our last bit of job orientation at the government building. It was nice to get away from our everyday school routine (seeing as how we're not yet teaching) and as always, it was great to hang out with other JETs and listen to 2nd and 3rd year JETs' stories about life. Seeing as ...

... The original intent for our trip was to withdraw some money from Zach's account back in Michigan, and Kyoto had the cloest international bank. We ended up roaming around the streets looking at stuff, and it was really neat! We began to play this game of Where's Waldo with the other foreigners (gaijin). :) It was so exciting to see them, escpecially since there aren't many where Zach and I are living. The two most common places people seemed to be from were Germany and France.