Here it is, as promised!
I’m gonna break this up roughly by area, and provide a little commentary for each group of pictures.
The Nintendo Museum
Like I warned you before, they ask you not to take pictures in a lot of it, so I don’t have a ton of pictures to share. But I do have a few!
Tea Ceremony
In Kyoto, we watched and pretended to participate in a traditional tea ceremony, in traditional garb! I don’t have any pictures from the ceremony itself because I was occupied, you know, being in a tea ceremony, but they encouraged us to take pictures before and after.
Fushimi Inari Taisha
Only a couple pictures here, but I felt like I should share the ones I did take.
Hiroshima Castle
These are from the castle in Hiroshima. We actually learned a lot inside it; Hiroshima city itself arguably only exists to build this castle!
Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park
Hard to find words to talk about this one; it was beautiful and haunting and kind of intense.
Izakaya
Only one picture and you’ve seen it before, but I needed to talk a little more about the Izakaya near our place in Hiroshima!
It was run by this guy Takezo, who was super friendly and talkative and very excited to have gaikokujin (foreigners) visiting his place! He spoke about as much English as we spoke Japanese (not much!), but we were able to talk a little bit – he’s a big anime geek, so we mostly just shouted the names of anime we liked and then either thumbs-upped or shook our heads if we approved or disapproved.
The guy in the back of the photo is Jeff, and we had fun talking to him, too – Micah especially, since he was sitting next to him. Jeff is an expat from Ohio who teaches English now; he’s been here for like 20 years!
Fukuoka, Especially Fukuoka Zoo
And finally, the place we spent the last week! It was a little more relaxing than we’d intended; we wanted to spend a day or two catching our breath from all the traveling with the McFarlands, but uh, turns out Fukuoka is a driving city, not a public transit city, so there wasn’t a lot that we had easy access to. (We could’ve done a lot more than we did, but we were feeling lazy, haha.)
The main exciting things were the Christmas festival at the train station/mall (actually like three malls all right next to each other?!), and the zoo!
Kansai International Airport
And that brings us to today! All we really did today was get here from Fukuoka, but we did that by plane – which means we flew into Kansai International Airport, located on a man-made island in the middle of the bay! We had to take a bridge to get out of the airport! It was crazy!
But that’s also all we’ve got for you now; we’re in Osaka for a couple days with no real plans but a lot of options, and then we’re off to Hakodate, which we’ve been looking forward to since we left Florida! Stay posted!