Japan

Japan, where should I begin? Japan is just simply amazing!!! We were so lucky of traveling there for 4 weeks, because every city we visited or activity we did, it was all equally as impressive and amazing! If you have the chance to go to one country in Asia, then I would recommend you to go to Japan. Definitely not the cheapest country in Asia to travel, but worth every penny :-D
We started our month in Japan in Tokyo, the most populated city in the world with a population of 37 million people. A very overwhelming city and even though we are both very experienced in taking the underground in huge cities like London or Paris, nothing prepares you for Tokyo were a daily number of train passengers in

the Greater Tokyo Area is approximately 20 million (!!). That in combination of half the signs in Japanese, it took us a few days not to take the wrong metro line ;-P But the funny thing is that after a few days you get used to the crazy amount of people and you start noticing the small things as people are always standing in a perfect line in order to enter the next metro, they enter without pushing, always stand on the left side of the escalator so on the right people can pass that are in a hurry or the fact that people still give their sitting seat to older people. But even more surprising is the silence in the underground, as nobody and I mean really nobody is speaking on their phone or talking with each other louder than a whisper. So pleasant and nice! And did you know that most Japanese are ready with a book cover, so other people aren't able to see which book they are reading? The Japanese culture is all about being super polite, kind of not standing out of the crowed and I can't explain how much people are willing to help. We had so many occasions that we asked

someone's help, finding out that they didn't speak more than 2 words of English and sometimes literally didn't spoke a word and still tried to help us. We also had several times that people wouldn't know the answer, but clearly felt bad they couldn't help and then 5 minutes later would run after us to tell us the correct way, because after we left they continued finding out, which way we should take. Where else in the world you find people that find you back in the crowed in order to be able to help you??
We visited a lot of places in Tokyo, but the most impressive ones were the Meiji Jingu Shrine, the most famous temple where we saw Japanese tradition weddings with the brides in white kimono's and big white hats and behind them the whole family following in traditional kimono's, or the Senso-ji Temple where you need to breath in the smoke of in the incense for good health and where for 5 yen you can pull out a chopstick with a number in order to find out

your daily horoscope. Not sure how much luck it brought us when we needed to repeated it 3 times before we got a semi-good day horoscope instead of a really bad day horoscope we got twice ;-P Except for visiting lots of temples we also went to the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Buildings were you have a great view of the entire city, the Tsukiji fish market where Yohan had lots of fresh oysters, the Shibuya Pedestrian Scramble where you see hundreds of people cross the street at ones surrounded by big neon video screens (like on Times Square in New York) , the Tokyo National Museum where we really cool learned how to write in calligraphy in Japanese and we also went for a day to the theme park Tokyo DisneySea of Disney Land. Very impressive and beautiful attractions and apparently very Japanese was that everyone brought these things to sit on because the Japanese would wait easily an 1.5 hour in line for a show all sitting and waiting on the ground :-) We also went for a day to Kamakura, an ancient city with lots of the Buddhist Zen temples

and Shinto shrines. With as most famous attraction the Kotokuin (Great Buddha of Kamakura), but what most stood out for us were the beautiful colors of the leaves in the trees. It's difficult to capture it in pictures, especially at night, but we walked together with hundreds of other people around the Hase-dera temple were in autumn the highlight is the different coloring of the leaves. If you can't visit Japan in spring to see the cherry blossom, make sure you visit like us in autumn and I promise you, you won't be disappointed!
Except for beautiful places to visit, food is also a daily little party. As probably all of you already know, is that my favorite food is sushi. Well in Japan you can eat it for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Doesn't matter if you want expensive sushi in a fancy restaurant or simple sushi in any supermarket, poor Yohan as he likes sushi, but definitely not more than 2 days in a row ;-) But no worries, lots of other tasty options like fresh sea food and lots of noodles. We ate in Tokyo in probably the smallest noodle restaurant ever, where there was only

one line at the bar you could sit. When you entered you had to put your order in a special machine (you can see it on the picture), you also pay in the machine, after you give your receipt to the person behind the bar where you receive within minutes a bowl of hot boiling noodles, really cool. Japan is the country of efficiency, even small things like annoying things like wet umbrellas, they have a solution for it. They put metal hangers in front of the buildings (see picture) where you can hang you umbrella safely and lock it so it's still there when you go home :-) Why don't we have that in the Netherlands? And at last, you will never be able to sit on a toilet seat anywhere in the world after being in Japan. First of all, they are impeccable clean, doesn't matter is you are in a hotel or somewhere in a metro station, I read somewhere, not sure if it's true or not, but that in Japanese culture they believe that a clean toilet brings luck. But not only that it's so clean, they have these amazing buttons (see picture) where you can choose how warm you want your toilet seat to

be heated (best thing ever, because it was really cold when we visited Japan!), no toilet paper needed as they have several options to have water spaying up, with of course the option how warm you want the water to be and so funny, you have an option, so when you don't want people to hear you pee, or making other toilet noises ;-) you only need to click on a button that will make a constant noise like if you flush the toilet, that's such a smart invention!

After spending a week in Tokyo and surroundings we continued to our most West destination: Hiroshima. Not the most beautiful city to visit, but definitely worth visiting the memorial places and the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. Of course, we all learned at school about the atomic bomb during World War II, but you only realized how much the bomb destroyed and effected for so many years after, when you see the facts in front of you in the museum.

After Hiroshima we continued to Nagoya where we did the amazing walk of 8 km from Tsumago to Magome. The nature is absolutely breathtaking and you walk on the old postal road where you pass all these traditional wooden inns that once hosted travelling samurai lords. Every hundred meters there was a big metal bell hanging and a paper what said, "Ring the bell hard against bears". So, you understand we didn't take any change and rang the bell as hard as could, better not to take any risk to bump into bears ;-).

Next we continued our trip into the Japans Alps and Takayama as our starting point. It's a sweet little city with nice temples to visit and beautiful old Japans style houses. From there we did 2 different day trips, one to Shin-Hotaka where you can take the Shinhotaka Ropeway, the double-decker gondola, up to the mountain. We went

early in the morning and it was so nice to walk on the mountain in the fresh snow :-) We also met some really nice and talkative Japanese people (normally the most people were too shy to start talking to us ;-) ), that gave us all kind of advises were to travel and showed us there favorite music. I couldn't believe it, they had several full performances of Andrey Rieu, this famous Dutch violinist and conductor. How big is the chance that this would be his favorite music?
The next day we rented a car for the day as Shirakawa-go & Gokayama are hard places to reach by public transport. Both are very little villages where they have these special old farmhouses with very high and pointy roofs. They say that the reason for the design is to withstand the large amounts of heavy snow that falls in the region during winter, because it doesn't matter how high the snow gets, they will be always be able to enter the house from the top floor windows.
The next day we took the train to Kyoto, but on the way, we stopped

in Kanazawa to do some site seeing for a day. It's a really nice city with lots of things to see, we managed to visit the Kanazawa Castle, the Kenrokuen Garden that is everything that you imagine of a beautiful traditional Japans garden, the Higashichaya Old Town, that's the old geisha neighborhood where we visited an old geisha house. So cool to see an original geisha house and to see all the small things that the geisha's used in order to dress up in their traditional clothes and even more impressive was the Nomura Family Samurai House, there you can see how the samurai's lived in the past and it's a gorgeous house with an impressive garden and these original sliding doors with beautiful paintings and tatami floor mats.
In Kyoto self-there are so many beautiful places to visit. My most favorite ones are the Kinkaku-ji (Golden Pavilion) where you can take amazing pictures from the lake and the Fushimi Inari-taisha Shrine, this is a religious and sacred place and in case you saw the movie "Memoirs of a Geisha" you will recognize the orange wooden poles

with Japanese phrases. Not only the shrine is very impressive, but behind there is a path that takes you for 2 hours up to the mountain. Except for lots of tourists you can also see many old people in excellent shape there for their exercise walks and lots of people walking around in traditional kimono's. One of these places that you already know you want to come back to one day :-D. Except for visiting many places and walking around in the city we did also something else very cool. We went to a special show where they performed 4 different Japanese art forms: geisha dancing, a traditional tea ceremony, a performance of a Koto (an ancient Japanese six-stringed instrument) and Kyogen Theatre (a form of theater that portrayed life as it was in a comical manner). And after that we spoiled ourselves for one night in a traditional Japanese style hotel. You can see on the pictures that you have a mattress on the Tatami floor mats and every room has a table where you can drink your tea. Also super Japanese is the Onsen in the hotel, that's a

traditional bath house with separated sections for man and woman where you can bath yourself next to other hotel quests and can enjoy the hot spring baths, a real experience to try out :-) (And in case you're not so much into that kind of thing, you can always take a shower in your own hotel room ;-) )What I almost forget to mention is that you are being expected to walk around in the hotel with a special kind of house kimono (for man and women the same) and that you aren't allowed to walk around with shoes, but that they give you these special wooden flip-flops that you wear with socks. To make the experience complete we also took the breakfast, hahaha... I don't think we will do that again as raw egg isn't our thing in the morning, but it was fun to try and it definitely looked beautiful all put together :-D

Close to Kyoto there are several cities that are worth visiting. We

started with Arashiyama where you can walk around in a big bamboo forest. When you see pictures of Japan, then many times they are taken in this bamboo forest. A very nice walk, but you need unfortunately share it with hundreds of other tourists ;-S After the forest there is also a really beautiful garden we visited. Because we were there during fall the trees had such beautiful colors!
The next day we went to Himeij, a city that is famous for an enormous white castle. Very impressive and one of these picture-perfect places. And the last city outside Kyoto we visited was Nara. My absolute favorite. First, it has a nice temple you can visit, Tōdai-ji Temple, that is the world's largest wooden building, surrounded with everywhere you look around you wild deer's that if you don't watch out steal food out of your hands ;-) And secondly because here one of my dreams came out: to walk around with a real kimono. I know it's so kitsch and tourist of me, but my g'd, it was sooooo much fun! :-D No regrets and one of these things you HAVE to do in Japan :-D

Our last part of the trip we first returned first back to Tokyo and after that we went for our last day trip to Nikko. It's a small famous city where you can visit the Shinto shrine. To be honest, I think we already saw too many temples, so even though it was pretty impressive, we both looked at each other and said: "Well, just another temple". Hahaha... not fair, because we probably would have been much more impressed in the beginning of our visit to Japan.

To finish the trip, we went for a weekend to Mount Fuji. It's one of the most touristic places in Japan and to be honest I thought.... OK, it's a mountain, how special can it be? But when we arrived I understood why everyone comes to visit the mountain. It's gorgeous! The pictures came out very well, but in real it's even more impressive!
A perfect place to finish our amazing month in Japan. I really hope we will ever have the chance again to return as it's an amazing place with

amazing people!

China, here we come!

(Travel plan: Tokyo, Kamakura, Hiroshima, Nagoya, Tsumago, Takayama, Shin- Hotaka, Shirakawa-go, Gokayama, Kanazawa, Kyoto, Arashiyama, Himeij, Nara, Osaka, Tokyo, Mt. Fuji & Nikko.)