1. Fake food -  I’ve already talked about this. As strange as it was, it came in very handy since there was such a lack of understood English, let alone English print on the menus. Pictures were taken on our digital camera of the meal we wanted and we simply showed our server, worked every time

2. Musical advertizing trucks – I already mentioned these too, trucks that drive around blasting the music of the band they’ve got plastered all over them. Not sure if they were actually transporting anything or not…

3. Cleanliness – We expected as much, but man are they obsessed. This poor man and his job of sweeping the endless falling leaves off this wide gravel road all day, every day…

4. Holy hospitable – I have never been to a country where a free public park bathroom was so clean, had toilet paper AND had three extra rolls of toilet paper on the corner shelf! What a treat!!!

5. The Japanese are so fashionable! – Especially in Tokyo. I have never seen so many stores that I wanted to shop at.

6. The masks – Probably one in five people is wearing one, seriously. It’s so, so common. What I didn’t get was the young girls who were wearing the mask (presumably because they had a cold) but were then wearing their scandalously short skirts or shorts in the nine degrees Celsius weather, seriously girls.

7. Gotta love their efficiency – How fabulous was it to have a line formed for the bus… well not that fabulous for us since we were close to the end but seriously, it’s been too long since we’ve been in a culture where getting from one place to another can be so stress free! (And that’s not all… The way people standing on the escalators stay to the left to let walking people pass on the right, the way they have arrows on the ground at the subway and train stations to direct the flow of people, everything felt so comfortable again, like we were in Canada, sigh)

8. Bowing – No image available for this one, but the stereotype is true. From a significant head nod to a full on bow, we experienced a lot of it from those that served us.

9. Funny mirrors – I’m not sure if this is that strange or not. The taxis all had them, surely there are other countries where this exists.

10. Funky toilets – I’ve already mentioned the amazingness of the “wash-lets” in Japan. Another interesting thing was that often times the sinks in the washroom were on the back of the toilet. The tap automatically turns on when you flush! Something else that I didn’t have the pleasure of discovering, but that Beth told me about is that there are some bathrooms (she talked of one in the subway station) that have a special button in the stall for a “flush” sound. It is apparently the same length as the longest possible fart.  How clever are the Japanese…

11. Walking grooves for the blind – We noticed this in China as well and again, I can’t remember if say, Toronto would have these or not, someone tell me. Either way, after living in such a unfriendly city to pedestrians let alone those in a wheelchair (Abu Dhabi is awful for it’s lack of ramps), this was refreshing.

12. Its a cultural faux pas to eat while walking in public – You don’t realize how much you may do this until you’re “not allowed” to…

13. Different money etiquette – When paying for a bill you always take it up to the cashier on your way out of the restaurant and tipping is considered rude.

14. Less English than expected – yep, we didn’t anticipate so many charades, it was fun though

Chocolate Milk Tea: taste like crappy vanilla hot chocolate including flavourless jellies. Not awesome but it kinda hit the spot on this chilly day.

Fried potato sticks: Tastes like triple fried old crunchy french fries, not bad if you’re hungry

Snack street treats: delicious dumplings, mediocre chicken drumstick, crunchy well seasoned scorpion, delicious deep fried banana (tastes like heaven), deep fried ice cream (the bread on the bottom was the best part) and candied fruit, among other things.

Everyone says good good eat: Tastes like typical spiced noodle sticks. Meh.

Red bean creme: Tastes like a marshmallow with a dollop of  beany/cherry flavoured stuff inside. Enjoyed these so much that I bought them again, however I ended up eating too many in one sitting and felt sick

???: Tastes like popcorn covered in cheap white chocolate, very strange I know.

What looked kind of like shortbread: Tasted like crap, we threw the rest of the package off the great wall (not the packaging! )

Other than the deep fried banana balls, my favourite snacks were the breaded products from nearby convenience stores (not pictured here). These pastries and sweet breads made for a delightful breakfast every time, good thing we were doing so much walking!

1. Temperature sensors at the air port- no viruses allowed!

2. Muffs on the handles of scooters. How very clever!

3. Coat covers at restaurants where you cook your own food at the table – makes sense I guess.

4. Public washrooms – literally all over the city.

5. Crotchless kids pants – this one was by far the strangest. Young toddlers can be found diperless in these crotchless (sometimes extending to the behind) pants in order to relieve themselves by taking a quick squat…(?) How those little cheeks stay warm is beyond me…

6. China, or at least the areas of Beijing that we saw were exceptionally clean – by that I mean, we expected it to look, feel and smell dirty and it didn’t.

7. Lots of elbowing – There were always crowds but usually enough space, nevertheless some Chinese person would walk by you and bump into you on the way…

8. Competitive table tennis? – There was a park close to our hostel that frequently had competitive ping-pong games going on inside it, something we’re not used to seeing at parks.

9. The Chinese are so active – be it line dancing in front of the Catholic church, dancing with ribbons, hacky-sack in the park, they are out and a bout and staying fit!

10. They are not so short – Skylar expected to feel tall in China He didn’t.

11. And seriously, what would China be like without any Engrish….

Indeed a pleasant end to our travels.

Next we hit up the bamboo forest in the Arashiyama area. I had been greatly looking forward to seeing the forest and my expectations were not disappointed. The tall bamboo stocks were such a sight and their slight creaking with the breeze was so cool. We thoroughly enjoyed our walk through the forest before heading back towards the train station where we had planned to meet Beth and Jesse.

Osaka, the last of our adventure is next.

Next we headed back to Nijo Castle, thankfully there were no unexpected closures on this day. The castle was built in the 1600′s by Shogun Takagauwa. It was an interesting walk around, unfortunately photos were not permitted inside.

We then took the subway to the Nansenji temple aka the Zen temple. It was constructed in the 1300′s and was originally a hangout for some emperor who later converted it into a temple. After walking around a little we made our way to the Philosopher’s Road.

The Philosopher’s Road is apparently one of the most popular areas in Kyoto for the viewing of cherry blossom trees, unfortunately for us there were only one or two trees in bloom. It was still a pleasant walk, there were many beautiful flowers in bloom and I had a fun time with my camera…

We were both happy to have had such a full day, sunshine and all.

We decided to hit up Nijo castle but upon our arrival it had been closed due to the “typhoon”. Being wet, cold and a little fed up, we made our way back to our room where we vegged out till dinner. Not a lot happened on our first day.

Luckily despite the forecast of rain, the following few days were sunny albeit cold. The next morning the first place on our list was the Fushimi-inari-taisha Shrine, a Shinto shrine to “the rice god”. If you’ve ever seen Memoirs of a Geisha you may recognize the orange-pillared arches in our pictures, there was something so beautiful about them, we couldn’t stop photographing them.

Next we hit up Kiyo Mizu-deru temple, aka the water temple. It was a scenic area although full of people. You can drink the water there and wish for up to two of three things… I believe they were 1) a happy love life. 2) success in your schooling, and 3) hmm… Help me out someone

After this we walked through many a quaint streets that led to Maryuama Park. It was neat to see the traditional looking buildings, beautiful weeping trees and even some geisha!

That’s not the end of our first day of sight seeing but I’ll stop here for now…

We weren’t sure whether we should wear our indoor Japanese sandals across the hotel to our dinner or our just leave on our normal shoes since we’d probably have to take them off at the door anyway… We opted for our normal shoes, arrived at the restaurant and found no place to leave outdoor shoes; everyone inside had their indoor sandals on. Everyone else was also dressed in their yukatas, nobody told us this was customary.

With things off to an awkward start we were ushered to a table that was spread full of raw seafood. We had a very friendly server come to our aid when she realized that we had no idea what we were doing. You see, there was a hot pot for cooking a couple of the items, there were different sauces for different items, things really were not straight forward. Once again, charades took place until our server just started doing things for us (putting our vegetables in the hot pot to create a broth, adding the certain seafood that was to be cooked before eating, moving fish into sauce bowls…) We sampled as much as we could (usually not knowing what we were eating) but we simply could not eat even half of it. It was an expensive meal and we knew that we probably wouldn’t eat our money’s worth but we were doing it for the experience so we didn’t mind too much; yet at the same time we wanted to make sure that we tried to eat as much as we could. Unfortunately the meal was like fear factor for me and ridiculous as this is, the experience of trying to eat things that so repulsed me, made me emotional at a time or two, video footage to follow…

Just when we thought we’d be heading back to our room the next course came. We didn’t really expect this since there was so much food on the table when we arrived. I didn’t even get a picture of the thinly sliced red raw beef that was brought to us. Although raw, I found it much easier to eat than anything else we’d already tried.

Once we had finished the beef another course was delivered, a piping hot stinky fish and oyster. The smell alone was so strong that it was making me gag. We started feeling worse and worse because there was more and more food being left uneaten. Luckily Skylar doesn’t mind fish when it’s cooked so he ate most of his plate and I forced him to eat a little of mine. Neither of us touched the oyster. Again I felt incredibly rude when our server returned to take our plates away, mine still having most of its contents uneaten.

Next came some tempura (battered and deep fried vegetables). It was a small course and go figure, my favourite.

After that another dish of seafood delicacies were delivered and some seaweed covered rice and seaweed soup after that. I continued to feel awful despite my attempts to communicate to our server that “I’m just so full already”…

I’m not sure I remember the last time I’ve felt so uncomfortable and eager to remove myself from a situation. I highly doubt our server would come to the conclusion that “they must not like seafood” because there would be no reason to order a traditional Japanese meal if that was the case. I’m not sure what she ended up thinking of us when we left. We made sure to give her big smiles, many “thankyous” , and compliments on the meal however she probably thought us crazy.

We made it to our hotel and checked in. Upon reaching our room we were pretty sure that we were somehow upgraded as we didn’t think we were supposed to have a balcony, a private bath, and above all our own massage chair!?! After unloading our stuff and testing out our chair we walked into town despite the rain to find some dinner. After that we didn’t waste any time returning to our hotel to make use of their natural hot spring baths.

The whole bathing experience was awkward at first. This was a first for us and getting stark naked in front of strangers is kind of a weird experience… Thankfully there was signage up in the changing rooms that told you how it all goes down. Turns out soaking in hot springs in the nude is quite relaxing and we’d highly recommend it!

After our soak we met back at the room (the baths are not coed) and continued to unwind with some local beers. We got to talking and then both suddenly realized that we accidently left Skylar’s laptop on the train! With nothing to be done until the morning, I spent the next hour before bed reading Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and Skylar, although he began by reading ultimately ended up falling asleep in our massage chair.

Thankfully the sun was shining when we woke up the following day. We made our way to the train station straight away to see if there was any chance of recovering Skylar’s computer. Lucky for us there was an employee on staff who was relatively fluent in English. I say lucky for us because it was her first day on the job! She tracked down the laptop and told us that it was at the police station in Miyazu, the next town over. We ended up catching a bus there within the next 30 minutes and we were at the station playing charades with a very bubbly and giddy police woman in no time. After much ado, we had the computer and we were on a train back to Amanohashidate!

The main thing on our list of things to do on this day was to take a gondola up the hillside to see the picturesque view of the area. It was so lovely from the top, the sun was warm, the sky was clear, we had the computer again, it was a happy time. After this we went out for lunch and roamed the town a little before returning to the hotel for another bath.

That evening we had booked ourselves a traditional Japanese dinner in the hotel restaurant. We knew that the dinner would be very fish heavy but we figured that we’re only in Japan once, and we should probably try a traditional meal. I will not go into detail about the dinner in this post for there is far too much to say. Come back in a couple days for the post on that entire experience.

We then enjoyed the use of our private bath and some local wine before settling in for the night. The following morning we had one more hot soak before heading to the train station, where we were off to Kyoto.

Once we dropped off our bags at our hostel we made our way to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. It was put together really well and was surprisingly objective. Another thing that was interesting but not entirely surprising, was that despite the fact that Japan has a very violent past the museum was extremely pro peace. The museum was quite educational, I continually found myself saying “wow” and “crazy” reading and looking at pictures of the time leading up to the bombing, the who, what, where, why of it all and then ultimately the devastating aftermath of it all.

Next we strolled through the Memorial Peace park, saw some monuments and made our way to the Atom Bomb Dome. The Dome has been fenced off and declared a UNESCO World Heritage site. The building was originally the Industrial Promotion Hall and was very close to the center of the explosion, it is therefore amazing that so much of it survived the bomb considering everything around it fo kilometers was leveled and especially considering that it is estimated that the shock wave from the bomb created a pressure of 35 tons per square meter at the hypocenter of it all (the hypocenter that was within a two kilometer radius of the Dome).

After this we made our way to Hiroshima Castle. Although it was beautiful on the outside the museum on the inside wasn’t all that interesting. Once we’d had our fill of samurai swords we left and wandered for a long time through the city. After stopping for dinner we made our way back to our cozy hostel room for a quiet night of relaxing and sampling some novelty snacks.