Pension Humming Bird Myoko

... If you dont already know, Hokosai painted the many scenes of mount fuji including the famous Wave picture you will all have seen. So it was quite a busy little place, with quite a few tour buses around. After checking in to the hostel we walked down the road to the museum and were inundated with free samples of various japanese foods, some nice some so very not. The exhibition was great, we were both very impressed by his work which included beautiful landscapes, scenes on ...

Nagano... ici Nagano. Apres la moiteur du sud, c'est un vent frais qui nous accueille dans cette ville de l'est des Alpes Japonaises. A Nagano il y a le temple Zenko-ji et les jeux olympiques d'il y a 11 ans, mais pas grand chose d'autre. Le temple renferme une icone de Bouddha vieille de plus de 1500 ans, mais personne ne l'aurait vue depuis plus de 1000 ...

... which lies about 30 minutes train ride west of central, Imperial palace Tokyo, thigns got really, really stressful. Tons of people, which was fine except I had my massive suitcase and for whatever reason, there's a lack of elevators. And escalators sometimes only reach half way up a floor so you have to drag your bag up the remaining flights of stairs. All this because I needed to buy a Keio bus ticket to get to Fuji later. But Shinjuku station has 2 ...

... from 9-5pm and we naturally got there too late.

I love bullet trains in Japan. We got from Nagano back to Tokyo in the space of an hour and a half and summing up enough energy we found our ludicrously small hostel with a kitchen meant for 40 guests consisting of two hobs and a hot plate and crawled into bed exhausted!


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... out a real Japanese castle. There are not too many of these left, as they tend to burn down easily - having been made of wood and all. Not sure how they'd go in a real war. Good defensive architecture (aside from the poor bloke who has to chop the wooden bridge down over the moat - what's a drawbridge?). Enfiladed walls. False gates. Misleading paths. Kelly Ninja proof. Got a match? The castle was cool. There used to be more of it, which I'm sure would ...

I am going to keep the chat to a minimum here and let the (many) photos do the talking. I went to Nagano to see the "Snow Monkeys". They were awesome. After a short 2km hike through snowy forested mountains, suddenly there were monkeys running across the path - and they literally came within an inch of my feet! Well worth the visit.

... your health. Another involved rubbing a sacred statue on the body parts that ail you, said to heal sickness. Outside the temple are areas for hanging wooden plaques. You write a wish on the plaque, or a prayer you would like to have granted and then hang it up. Inside the temple, there was a queue of people waiting for their chance to find the key to salvation! Needless to say we joined the queue, and found ourselves walking blindly through a ...

... grapes and apple pears. So good! Then we went to the Junior High School. It was a beautiful new building, and the kids... they were so respectful! Every one we passed smiled and said kanichiwa. They were doing some kind of sports festival when we got there, all in matching school uniforms. Next stop was the bee museum. It was the kind of thing you really need to see to believe... After that we went to the community center and city hall, and visited with ...

We took the Shinkansen to Nagano using our rail pass and after arriving found out which bus to catch out to M-Wave, the ice skating rink used in the winter Olympics. We had never been ice skating so were willing to give it a try.

Took an old wooden floored bus out to M-Wave and walked past a sign in Japanese then paid for our ticket to the ...

... the lobby and sat down with our bus neighbors. Around that time a trio from I think Central America began playing music. I believe the instruments were a harp, a guitar (or something like it), and a rattle type instrument. The woman sang, and the two men played their instruments, and every so often would sing in chorus with the woman. It was interesting.  It made me think of my coming trip to Costa Rica this summer! After a while, I figured I would go up to the room and ...