So the pre-vet forum at SDN--which is one of the reasons I started a blog in the first place--has started a Blog Topic of the Week thread. The question I'm answering is not vet school-related at all: "If you could go on vacation anywhere in the world, where would you go? What would you do while there (activities, attractions, food, etc)?" Instead of a hypothetical, though, I'm going to talk about an actual dream trip that I got to go on.
For my graduation present, I really wanted to go to Thailand with my dad, and I'm so grateful he made that happen! In fact, we didn't only visit Thailand--we went several places in Japan and to Cambodia as well as a stopover in Seoul. I call it our Asiadventure. It was 10 cities in two weeks, and it was amazing! Since it was so long and we did so much stuff, I'm going to only talk about Japan in this post. Maybe next time I'm procrastinating studying I'll add another post about it!
I'm going to tell this story in mostly pictures, largely because of how long it would be if I didn't...
Our first stop was Fukuoka, Japan. It's not necessarily a major tourist destination, and I don't exactly think its one of the Japanese cities everyone knows. But it's the city where two of my friends did study abroad, and I wanted to do some of the things they did!
Dancing fountain show the first night, in the mall our hotel was basically attached to.
This type of gate means behind it is a Shinto shrine. This one was Daizeifu Shrine, in honor of a scholar.
His family had a tie to plum blossoms, so they were all over the place. No, I don't know what the sign says; I don't know nearly enough kanji for that.
Here's a picture of the shrine...one of many temples in our visit.
Neko Cafe (cat cafe)! It's a restaurant/coffeeshop type deal, and they have a bunch of cats hanging around. They have toys for you to play with them, and my dad and I even got to feed them some treats!
So you can have some idea how many cats there were...but there were more. They swarmed around us when we had food for them! They were quite polite about our lunches though.
See the fish swimming around in there? This is a restaurant called Zauo, and you catch your own fish from here and they prepare it for you! I got a tempura flounder, and dad got red snapper sashimi. It was really good, and super fresh of course!
Not pictured: using my Japanese skills to get Iced Cocoa (which tasted rather like YooHoo) out of a vending machine instead of all the coffee drinks I didn't want. Yay for reading katakana!
Our next destination in Japan was Hiroshima. Looking around there at all the monuments and museum and everywhere a call for peace, I thought that world leaders should all need to visit here when they get elected/chosen however. We were here for less than a day, perusing all this before moving on.
The A-Bomb Dome: the only structure left standing in the area after the bombing.
Paper cranes: it's said that if you fold 1,000 of them, your wish will come true. Children in Japan fold them, wishing for peace, for this monument, in memory of Sadako, an athletic little girl who died of leukemia from prenatal radiation.
This is the children's bell. There are apparently always school trips, where the children come out to the children's monument and do a little ritual/ceremony/song for peace. The top of the bell where it hits to make noise looks like another folded crane.
Line of monuments; they're all set in a line, so if you look through that arch at the end you can see all of them.
Shinkansen! The bullet train we took between different cities in Japan.
Not pictured: We had Hiroshima-style okonomiyaki, with layers of batter, cabbage, bean sprouts, meat, noodles, and egg. There is also Osaka style, where everything is mixed up together.
The next stop was Osaka. If you're an anime fan/have watched Azumanga Daioh, you'll recognize the name of where one of the characters came from. They're known for a distinctive way of talking, great comedy, and being major extroverts.
Osaka Castle, where I learned about Hideyoshi. He was a clever guy who flooded castles and had a gold tea set, but when he died with no sons of ruling age there was a Summer War due to the traitor among the five who had promised to carry on his line.
The main keep is on its 3rd or 4th iteration. The first was black lacquer, but the rest are white plaster.
These little guys are on a lot of historic buildings. They're supposed to guard from fire, but they don't work too well.
Dotonbori, the massive shopping district.
IIRC, this picture was taken from the "seduction bridge." The Japanese term literally means fishing; it's where guys fish for single girls, apparently.
Kyoto was the next city we visited, and this area was my personal favorite. There were so many cool things to see and do here!
Famous zen garden at Ryoanji temple
This was the moss garden, which I thought was even nicer than the rocky zen garden.
The whole grounds of Ryoanji temple were beautiful. I really like this picture, so I'm throwing it in here.
The Golden Pavilion! Built by the magistrate who betrayed Hideyoshi; the whole outside is covered with gold foil 0.2 microns thick. I have a scroll of it hanging in my room at school that I got from the gift shop.
This is another picture from the Golden Pavilion area, and another one I just like a lot. This one I blew up and framed in the guest room at my parents' house.
I didn't take these picture, but these are a signature sweet of Kyoto. I called them "Kyoto triangles," but googling to find this picture tells me they're actually called yatsuhashi. They're steamed mochi (soft rice dough) surrounding a sweet red bean paste, although there were other flavors that we saw later on. These are really good!
Nishiki food market! I was really excited about getting to see all the foods I wouldn't even know what they were, and it did not disappoint.
A lot of restaurants used plastic food like this to advertise; the practice started in Osaka.
A very old traditional Japanese shop.
Shogun's private quarters at Nijo Castle (actually, this is probably the more public part--I don't think we could take pictures in the actual private quarters).
Nijo Castle is famous for its Nightingale Floor--it's purposely squeaky in the rooms for receiving former enemies, so you know if they're sneaking up behind you!
Japanese gardens have 3 elements: water, trees, and rocks. Rocks are most important since they don't change, so they worked very hard to find the perfect rock to be a bridge here.
Kiyomizu temple ("pure water temple") is dedicated to making wishes come true. Pictured here is the purification ritual, which we encountered in many Japanese temples: wash left hand, then right hand, rinse the mouth using your left hand, then pour the rest over the handle.
Not pictured: The delicious skewers we had at a restaurant that does lunch for salarymen. The miso soup was really good, and there were about 6 skewers with chicken and different sauces, which were all delicious. We also had Kobe beef at a fancy teppanyaki place with a yummy salty "baked" potato traingle and orange ice cream
Nara was basically a day trip from Kyoto, and I'm including it with Kyoto as my favorite part of the trip. It was the ancient capital of Japan in the 700s.
In Nara park, the deer are so used to people they'll come right up to you! They sell packets of crackers you can feed them (which we did, twice). There was even one deer lying on the ground who let me sit next to him and pet him! His antlers were all velvety-soft.
The (supposedly) largest Bhudda, at Todaiji Temple. He had four guards (more figures), one for each direction.
Kasuga Taisha Shrine, with all these stone lanterns. Some had wood (even a stump that looked like it had been cut out of a tree and placed there) as a box for the light in the lantern. There were many young babies and a wedding here: Shintoism is for your happiness (in the present), so they have a baptism-like ritual there, while Bhuddism is for your ancestors/place in heaven.
As we drove, we happened upon this festival! I got to eat a taiyaki (fried pastry in the shape of a fish, filled with sweet red bean paste), which is one of the best things I ate while there. Also I got a kimono!
I recognized this game at the festival because we played it in the Japanese language club in undergrad. You use a hook on the end of a paper to try and pick up the balloon toys by a loop in a long rubber band stretching from the end without the hook breaking off (which it will if the paper gets wet). Then the balloon is like a yo-yo!
We spent just one night at the ryokan, a traditional Japanese Inn.
I took a bath in this tub at the ryokan.
They lent us clothes to relax in (we wore them to dinner and referred to them as our "dinner uniforms") as well as the pink pajamas. Dinner had 9 courses--super fancy!--and the best thing was the iris cake, which was shaped like a little plum with an edible gold leaf and was made out of purple and yellow sweet potatoes.
Zen garden at the ryokan
You can see the different little buildings people stay in
Not pictured: the little hard candies our fantastic driver Ozaki-san kept putting in the back for us since we had long drives (the peach ones were my favorite), and a tea ceremony with jelly cake type things and ginger chips. It was at Hakusason-so, an artist's former residence. We got prints of the artists work, too! Mine has a gray horse on a pale gold background, and dad got a ship that's supposed to bring in money.
Final stop in Japan was the current capital: Tokyo!
Megane bridge, so called because with the reflection it looks like glasses
Wedding (I think) procession at the Shinto shrine
The big main street of Harajuku, Tokyo's youthful fashion district
This is the sort of thing you see in Harajuku. Also cosplay outfits for sale!
The Akihabara region started with electronics and gained more Japanese nerdiness
We visited the Pokemon Center to get a bunch of stuff for my little brother
e We weren't in time to get a reservation to see the tuna auction, but we still got to see Tsukiji fish market. These things were all over the place, and frequently come close to running people over. You have to watch out for them!
Look at all the fish! Also octopus.
Giant tuna--this is how big a tuna is.
This is what wasabi looks like when it's not already paste.
The last thing we did in Japan was a cooking lesson. We went to our sensei's house, and we were expecting just one sushi roll each or something, but instead we had a feast! We chopped things and cooked things and washed things and rolled sushi, and we also got red snapper (a fish for special occasions, according to our sensei), sesame-cooked carrot and burdock, miso soup, and a mess of tempura including leaves that she referred to as Japanese basil. I also tried on a kimono (the obi felt a bit like a corset) and then we had an impromptu tea ceremony with green tea mochi filled with red bean and a pastry with white filling that's apparently famous. When you drink ceremonial green tea, you turn the cup because you're not supposed to drink from its front.
Oh, actually that wasn't the last thing--we finished off with a visit to a maid cafe, but we couldn't take pictures inside. It was called @home, and when you enter they greet you with おかえり ("welcome home"/"welcome back." It was super cute. We got magic shaker drinks that involved saying things along with the maids. We got "lvl. 1 master" membership cards, and I wrote my name on mine in katakana.
Not pictured: Japanese breakfast pastries from the shinkansen station: I got a sweet bread thing (the milk version; there was the same thing next to it and then the milk version), dad got a super cheese pastry, and we split a bacon and egg pastry. I was really proud of how I was able to read enough to figure out what we wanted, and everything was yummy! Also, we got black sesame and chestnut flavored soft serve on the walk on the way to the Bhuddist temple. There was a lot of great food in Tokyo...we had shabu shabu and sukiyaki and a number of yummy fried things on sticks with different sauces.
Also worth noting is the Japanese breakfast (which we had several times throughout the trip, even when we could have had a more usual breakfast. Adventure, remember?). It involves things like soup (which is sipped, not eaten with a spoon), fish, rice, and tamagoyaki (a sweet egg custard sort of thing). Unfortunately I don't think we ever remembered to take any pictures of it...
We did all that stuff in one week! Hopefully that's enough pictures for you to enjoy visiting Japan vicariously on my wings ;)
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