Hiroshima

Hi folks,

So we've spent a few days in Hiroshima. It's a really nice place most famous for being the first ever atomic bomb target. Here's a picture of the 'A-dome' a buliding that was almost directly below the explostion (which was 600m off the ground) and therefore managed to remain structurally intact.

The museums and memorials did a good job of describing how vast and indiscriminate the destruction was. Sombre stuff.

The town itself was nice to wander around. It has a huge shopping street full of cafes and clothes shops frequented by teenagers with big hair.

On our last full day we visited Hiroshima Castle (rebulit after the bomb). It was a beautiful wooden building filled with facts about the castle and the history of Hiroshima. It even has some samurai helmets and stuff you could try on. You can see Sueann in a big samurai hat on facebook. The ground of the castle were lovely too, the leaves are just starting to turn red orange and yellow amidst all the green. Here's me in front of the castle.

It's our last night in Kyoto tonight so it's time to do a bit of souvenir shopping. I need to decide wether to buy a big robot here or wait till I get to a huge toy shop in Tokyo which could have bigger and better robots. (The link you sent looked really good Jason, I'll keep my eyes open for them).

bye bye.

Kyoto....wow

Hello all,

We have been in Kyoto for 3 days now and we have barely scratched the surface of what it has to offer. It`s a beautiful modern city with masses of history woven in. We have been to loads of temples, shrines, palaces and castles, as well as some very important Geisha spotting (verging on stalking at times!)
We`ve had to cram a lot in so are suffering from aching feet now. It`s best to show through photos, so here goes.....

This is the Golden Pavillion and as you can see it is very gold. All of the temples and shrines have really amazing gardens. The leaves have just started to turn autumn colours so it makes for quite a view.



This is a photo of a couple of ladies walking in the grounds of the castle. How beautiful are they???






This is the Gion part of town. (famous for Geisha). We were really lucky last night and got there at as loads of them were arriving for a big party.

We didn`t get any photos sadly, but you can take our word for it that they were pretty spectacular. They are so graceful and elegant.


We went to this shrine this morning and we were gob smacked by the size of it. We had read about it in the guide book but it didn`t mention that there were literally hundreds of red gates. It must have taken us at least 45 minutes to walk through them all.





Here is another one of the gates.

Hakone and Fukuzumiro

Hello,

I won`t mention Tokyo yet because we have only had one full day there, and we have four more before we leave Japan. So let`s start with Hakone;

We had a couple of nights in the Hakone region of Japan famous for it`s Onsen (natural hot spring baths) and views of Mount Fuji. I had booked us into a traditional Japanese Ryokan for Sueann`s birthday. The Ryokan is a 100 year old inn originaly run by a samurai. While in the Ryokan we wore yakata and walked around in slippers. We quickly dismissed the single sex communal onsen and had a dip together in the family onsen by ourselves. Totally relaxing.

For breakfast and dinner we ate our way through about five courses of the finest japanese food. We had familiar things like raw tuna, fish tempura, and bowls of noodles with scallops and other sea food. As well as indescribable tastes and textures. My mouth is watering thinking of it.

Our time in the Ryokan was perfect from start to finish

We did a bit of sight seeing on our full day in Hakone which was really nice. As is usual for the region it was to cloudy to see Mount Fuji but we had fun going up the hills in a cable car and across the river in a ...erm ...pirate ship!?!? Then back to the Ryokan for a soak in the onsen, mmmm.

Here`s a few pictures of the Ryokan. Hopefully they will show how great it was.

This is us having a spot of dinner









This is dinner. One of many courses. Yum.









Here is the view from our windows.









Me in the garden surrounded by the rest of the hotel. It is actually darker than the picture but still beautiful.









Sueann making herself pretty.












Bye for now.

Answers for Jason: Korean edition

A few quick questions to answer from Jason:

Who won the basketball?
The Lakers... of course.

Did you see anyone get hitched in Vegas?
Nope, but every casino had a chapel so there was plenty of opportunity to see one if we had wanted to.


What kinda meat are you cooking in S.Korea?
In the photo it was beef marinated in garlic among other things, but my favourite version was spicy pork. Delicious.

Is S.Korea sky rises or is it all shanty town, or in between?
We were only in Seoul, which is a very modern city with probably the cleanest most efficient subway I`ve ever been on. From what I can gather South Korea is a very developed nation producing some of the best cars and technology in the world (like my tele back home).

The picture for this blog entry is Stuart`s cat Yang Yang (translates to Meow Meow).

News from Japan next... maybe tomorrow.

Korea

Sorry to overload you with so many entries in one go but it's getting harder to keep up to date.

We've been in Korea for the last week staying with a friend (Stuart). It's been really great staying with someone who lives here. Not only do we get to eat cereal and drink tea for breakfast, but we also get insider tips on what to do.

We have eaten some of the most amazing food of our entire trip so far. Stuart has been taking us to little local places where you cook your own meat at the table. It's really delicious. Here is a photo of us (the laughing couple on the right are friends of the guy taking the photo)

We took a trip to the DMZ to get a glimpse of North Korea. It was quite a weird place really. A great big no mans land between two countries. It is quite tightly guarded and we had to follow some strict rules about what we could and couldn't do. The North Korean soldiers were taking photos of us. If we waved or pointed they would alter our pictures to look as though we were sticking our finger up at them. They would then use it as propaganda. It was really good to learn more about the history of it all.

Here is a photo of the room that any talks happen between the North and South. The table is exactly half in North Korea and half in South Korea. We were allowed to walk on to the other side of the table but that was as close as we could get to entering the North.

We went to the palace yesterday. It has some really beautiful buildings there but the most amazing part was the autumn colours. The trees are so colourful!

Viva Las Vegas

We made a little detour to Las Vegas as a birthday present for me (Matt). One night we went to see a pre-season NBA basketball game between the LA Lakers and the Sacremento Kings.

We had a great time with beer and hot dogs and a huge foam finger to wave. After the game we headed down the strip looking in all the casinos and ended up in New York New York. We gave ourselves $10 each to gamble but got bored of losing after spending $7 so we bought a burger and drank a metre long daiquiri. At midnight we had a go on the rollercoaster you can see in the picture, and almost lost the burger and booze. It was a great night out.

After Las Vegas we headed back to San Fransisco for a day before heading to Korea to visit Stuart. So now we are all caught up we can tell you about our week in Seoul...

San Fran

Hello!

It's been longer than usual between blog entries so we have some catching up to do, firstly lets back track to San Francisco:

We loved our brief few days in San Francisco. First we stayed in North Beach at a really quirky little hotel. We went to the famous Pier 39 where lots of sea lions living beside it. Here is a photo of them at sunset.

At the pier you could eat a wide selection of seafood including chowder served in a bowl made from sour dough bread.

We also had a good look around Alcatraz which was very interesting.