This Is A Lake - A travel blog

Today we were also treated to a gloriously sunny morning, so we decided to go on a day trip to Nara to make the most of the nice weather. There are JR trains going to Nara that you can board with your JR pass, but that line goes to the JR Nara station, which is rather far away from Nara Park, and it also takes longer; it's better to pay the 700 yen (€6) and take a Kintetsu line to the Kintetsu Nara station, and from there to just walk to the park. The train ride takes about 40 min. Rather than making a bee-line for Nara's main attraction, the Great Buddha, we started with Yoshiki Garden, which is free for foreign visitors! It's a gorgeous 20th century Japanese garden (not that I could tell; to me it looked like it had lain there for centuries, it was so well designed).  The garden occuies a rather modest plot, but as with many Japanese gardens it has been masterfully designed to offer lots of distinct spaces. There's a tea ceremony garden, a moss garden, and a more West

Sleeping on a futon over tatami is GLORIOUS. I don't know what it is about it that hits my "off" switch and instantly puts me in a deep and dreamless slumber. The alarm had to wake me up to a bright, sunny morning! Today's Friday, so I thought it might be wise to go to Kiyomizu-dera, Kyoto's most popular temple, before the weekend crowds rush in. It's a bit up on the eastern hills of the city, so wherever you're staying it's probably best to take a bus. Buying that Japanese SIM card was the best purchase I've done all trip, because now I can just look up on Google Maps where the bus stop is, which bus I need to go on, and how many stops I need to wait through. The closest to Kiyomizu-dera is Kiyomizu-michi, which is still about a 10-min uphill walk away from the actual temple. As soon as we started ascending we started seeing more and more people joining the route, until we got to the temple itself, where all of Kyoto seemed to have gathered. There

Today we left our apartment in Tokyo and took the shinkansen to Kyoto! It wasn't one of the really fast ones though, it felt like it had a lot of stops on the way... This time I managed to look out the window and see the scenery change. The landscape began very urban while we were leaving Tokyo and then Yokohama, then turned suburban, and at one point all I could see were ghastly factories surrounded by small houses spewing white smoke onto the sky. It made me think of a daytime version of FF7's Midgar. I think it wasn't until we were past Nagoya and getting close to Kyoto that the industrial areas gave way to forested mountains in beautiful autumn colours. We arrived in Kyoto at around 14:00, so we headed up to Kyoto Station's 11th floor to have a great tonkatsu lunch in one of the many restaurants there. Yeah, the 11th floor: like many Japanese stations, Kyoto's is a behemoth of a building that houses an entire department store and a score of restaurants inside. I

Our last day in Tokyo! After walking up and down the city for about five days, two and a half hours sitting down tomorrow in the shinkansen sound pretty good right now! We decided to start the day with a good dose of culture and hopped on the Yamanote line to go to Ueno, on the north side of Tokyo. It was sunny and clear today but every once in a while freezing winds would sweep through. We walked across the park square, surrounded by more schoolkids than tourists, looking at the odd red tree in an otherwise very green landscape. An old man appeared out of thin air, handed me a map of the park, and vanished as musteriously as he arrived -if this is going to embark me on a vision quest I think I haven't the time! (But a very kind gesture). Our goal was to go to the Tokyo National Museum, the Louvre of Japan, which occupies four or five buildings inside a compound. I had been here on my last visit, but I was so exhausted by then that I only took a very cursory tour of the main exhibi

There was nothing I wanted for today than to spend the day blissfully walking from one ancient temple with breathtaking landscapes to another, and that's exactly what I got! It was overcast and noticeably cooler than yesterday, but it was still very nice to walk around. We went to Tokyo Station and took the train there to Kita-Kamakura, the station just before Kamakura proper. The most common itinerary is to go to Kamakura Station, see the Great Buddha and Hasedera, then walk across town to see the temples, but I decided to mix it up a bit and do the visit the other way round. The train ride takes about 55 min. Actually, the train ride takes 54 minutes exactly, because Japanese trains are as punctual as you expect. Several times I've done the exercise of looking at my watch as a train's arrival time approaches, and every time when the watch is about to strike the given minute you can start to see the train coming in the distance. As you leave Kita-Kamakura station, the firs

So our plan to spend this beautiful, sunny day in Kamakura went out the window when the airline failed to deliver our luggage yesterday, after we spent all afternoon stuck in the apartment. After two excruciating phone calls with customer service, in Japanese as well as English, we discovered that the deliverymen had actually visited... An hour before the 16:00-20:00 window we had been given, while we were out. So today we managed to get them to commit to come by at 14:00 on the dot (they came at 12:00; good thing that we had wised up and mom stayed in the apartment). After my experience with Japanese customer service, I made a quick foray into Akihabara, to browse in a couple of manga/anime/game/geeky stuff stores. It was even more colourful, loud and maddening than I remembered it. I love the place! In some stores even each individual bookcase had its own unique soundtrack, contributing to a sensory overload that builds up over time and only becomes evident when you walk away and not

Save for a couple of jetlagged awakenings, I had a good night's sleep and woke up to blue skies, the shining sun, and a glorious 17°C. Back to the suitcase with the winter clothes! Today's plan was to do a tour of Tokyo's fashion hub around Harajuku. We had a very early start because I wanted to beat the crowds, which we did, to a fault: we arrived just as they were beginning to open the stores (most open between 10:00 and 11:00). We had to loiter a bit because there has to be some madness in Harajuku for the full experience! We took the JR line to Harajuku station and began our walk with Takeshita-dori, the crazy loli/goth street where every other store sells platform shoes, ruffled skirts, or crepes. It was as deliciously mad as I remembered it, with many stores playing sickeningly sweet jingles outside. Some of the passersby looked even more garish than the mannequins. Even the food offerings here are sugary and cute, with every corner housing a Japanese creperie. Crepes