I headed to Kyoto for a long weekend (skipping class already) while the Gion Matsuri was on. It's considered one of Japan's biggest festivals and involves preparing 32 huge floats to parade around the city. This festival started 1000 years ago while a plague swept through Japan. The floats were thought to enter the spirit world during their course around the city, which allowed the people to pray for the dead. It has continued every year and is supposedly the original Festival of the Dead (or Obon).

My first trip on the bullet rain:

Breakfast of Japanese champions! You can get really cheap takeaway meals like this sushi platter for $3, but there is rarely any chairs to sit on to eat, and since it's considered taboo to eat while you walk in Japan it makes it really difficult to have a cheap brekky on the run. Buying a starbucks coffee was the easiest solution. Too bad it cost more than the sushi.

After 4pm the major roads were closed and pedestrianised to allow food vendors, musicians and many other stalls to open up for the evening as part of the celebrations. The best part was that about half the city was dressed in yukata (summer kimonos) with their hair up in buns and the pretty hair pieces dangling down the sides. It made the whole festival feel so much cooler.

These girls were so happy when I asked if I could take their photograph!

Kyoto is just beautiful. There are thousands of shrines and gardens, and most aren't even signposted if they're not considered top notch. So I went to a few of the popular ones but for the rest I just explored on my own and stumbled across a few of these places:

Kyoto is situated in a valley and up one of the mountain is a hiking path covered with bright orange Torii gates. I've heard about the bus loads of tourist that get dumped here every morning so I got up bright and early at 6am to make the hike by myself. It was so surreal, especially when the early morning sun shone through the gaps between the gates.

There are shrines along the way called the Fushimi Inari shrines (fox shrines), and there are statues of foxes throughout which guard each shrine. At the end you could buy a fox template, decorate it and leave it at the shrine for good luck. 

To finish off the trip I wanted to go somewhere nice for lunch to trial some typical Kaiseki ryoori food. I stumbled across a restaurant with a large queue out the front, so of course I decided toe at there. And of course I got the deluxe meal that had a little bit of everything. After 30 minutes I was led inside to a beautiful wooden bar with only 5 seats facing the chef's and their working bench. They all worked so quickly putting the meal together and placed it in front of me.

It looked incredible, but unfortunately I had no idea how I was supposed to eat it without doing something offensive. Luckily the people next to me had just received their meals so I just copied them. There was some sweet, grilled fish/eel dish, then some amazingly crispy tempura, and the softest sashimi I've ever eaten. All accompanied by pickles, dried seaweed (which you're supposed to eat dry with rice, we're doing it wrong in Australia), cold green tea, miso soup, a tofu dish, rice, and I think dried shrimp? The verdict: one of the best meals I've ever eaten, especially when considering how unique and intimate it was!

I finished off my trip to Kyoto with a walk around Gion, and was lucky enough to see a geisha hurry past with an entourage of girls holding her umbrella and bag. The photos are on my camera so they'll have to wait.

The festival was so incredible that I decided to return mid week (and skip yet another day of class) to see the actual parade. Photos of that to come soon.

The Emperor of Japan and the imperial family live at the Imperial Palace in Tokyo, however the public is still able to visit the palace gardens. They are so vast and beautiful (Mike you'd be impressed), and give you a real sense of old Tokyo whilst being in the midst of new Tokyo (see photos below).

After our tour of the gardens our class decide to do a tour of the izakayas (Japanese pubs) of Shinjuku. This ended up much harder than we thought as surprisingly, traditional izakayas aren't too keen on having a group of 10 gaijins (big, ignorant westerners) take up half of their seating area. Somehow we managed to find a Korean bar which served 1L steins of Asahi and cook your own wagyu meat on the provided BBQ.

As most people know, I'm pretty slow at eating, especially when I'm savouring food while drinking. So because I was too busy talking and drinking my huge stein of beer, the BBQ got taken away before I'd finished cooking all of my steak! Luckily I'm not indifferent towards eating raw meat so, when in Japan...

3 days later and I didn't get sick! I think the majority of meat I've eaten so far has been raw: beef, fish, squid, prawns, pork, but yet to try chicken (there is a place in Tokyo that is renowned for it's chicken sashimi, not so keen on trying that one though).

On the way to Shinjuku there was a huge crowd of young girls in a corner of the station so we had to see what the fuss was about. Was there someone famous in the station? As we managed to push our way through to the front of the crowd we saw the hottest boy band in Japan at the moment!! But not in person, just on a new poster they'd unveiled for their upcoming album. The crowd was going nuts, everyone trying to get pictures of it! I couldn't believe all this fuss could be over a poster! I still have much to learn.

In the spirit of learning, we all went to a cosplay karaoke bar where they provided us with different cosplay outfits. I had to take a photo of this ridiculous outfit which was only just held together with velcro at the back! I had to make sure I didn't get too excited in a song (impossible if you imagine me singing Don't Stop Me Now) or it would bust open. Not made in gaijin sizes.

So having felt educated in the way of cosplay and karaoke, I was ready to head home, but not before being immersed in the intense neon lights of Shinjuku crossing.

Thanks for reading! 

さら　(Sarah)

Tokyo is crazy! Cartoon and anime characters feature in most advertisements instead of regular actors, you can get anime characters on your credit cards and you can use your train card to buy groceries and drinks at touch screen vending machines. Everybody dresses so conservatively, yet there is soft porn advertisements everywhere for anybody to see. All the men wear white business shirts, or light blue if they’re feeling adventurous! Here's an example of one of their boy bands!

Below is a Miku Hatsune visa card. She is top of the J-pop charts, yet is an animated character vocaloide.

Such fresh, vibrant sushi here. I can only tell what's tuna and what's salmon, the rest is just trial and error. So far I really like tuna belly (toro) and an unidentified oily, slimy, white fish. The only thing I haven't liked so far is sea urchin...

I walked around the Tokyo food show which is effectively like the expensive delis in the basements of shopping malls like Marks and Spencer and found some pretty unique foods. Namely, this bright pink octopus tentacle that I just had to try! It was fun to eat, and not the worst thing I've eaten over here.

That night my family took me out to a sushi train restaurant. Every seat had an iPad to order off so you could either pull dishes off the conveyor belt or order them fresh. If you ordered off the conveyor belt, there was an actual train track above it with a mini electric bullet train that came out to your 'station' in front of you and delivered you your sushi. There was also a fairy floss machine which the kids went nuts with!

I had my first class today. They announced at the start of the class that they teach using an extremely daunting method of throwing you into the deep end by only speaking Japanese in class. As a result the teacher had to use a lot of gestures and pictures. I can see myself getting really good at charades, or really far behind in class.

All up, a very exciting first day in Tokyo. Looking forward to the next few days.

Finally after a cancelled flight, an unexpected 24 hour stopover in somewhere south of the Gold Coast and a 12 hour flight I have made it to Japan. Bring it on.



This is my host family, the Fujimoto family:
Father - Hiroyuki
Mother - Kumiko
14 year old daughter - Ayaka

8 year old twin boys - Taiga and Ginga

This is my room. It's nice and large by Tokyo standards, has its own air conditioning and a wardrobe bigger than my one at home. The unfortunate thing is the futon, the traditional Japanese bed. It's essentially just a thin mattress on the hard wood floor, that can fold up to make more space during the day. A novelty at first, now I'm just dreaming of my huge waste of space western bed. Supposedly hard beds are very common in Japan though so I think I'll have to keep dreaming for the next month!

This is my street, somewhere near Oimachi station. Taiga regularly asks me to walk him to school (he's the boy in front with the super dope back pack).

I was expecting a mild summer, the websites I'd looked at gave estimates of 24-28°. However, it's much hotter than that, and so incredibly humid. It's all people can talk about, "Atsui desu ne" (it literally is, it's one of the first sentences we learnt)! At least I'm better at handling it than the English boys! Every morning on the train this cartoon shows the daily weather with recommendations to drink water and use cool towels for your head. Also, Mario delivers the train rules to everyone on the train video screens! Why use a real actor when you have cool anime and video game characters to do it instead? 

The morning rush. Trains come every 2 minutes, yet people still rush and push to get on to the first train they can, but in an orderly fashion though of course! All the stairwells have up and down lanes, and the trains have waiting lanes on either side of the doors before getting in. Then the push starts. When you're a few metres from the door, it may look as though the train is too squished for you to get on, but with a rugby scrum pushing pfrom behind, both you and the 4 people behind you manage to push in to the train carriage. I have watched a train go past that was so full, that one man's body and face was literally squished up against the windows like you see in cartoons when someone runs into a door! I was so upset I wasn't fast enough to take a photo of it, so this one will have to do instead. I was barely able to lift my arm up to take the photo.

So that's the start of my adventure. Sorry for any spelling mistakes or poor formatting, I'm having to do this from my phone.