So sad to be leaving

I’m coming to the end of my last full day here in Japan. I’ve had such a wonderful visit, it’s making me not want to leave! (I acknowledge that visiting a foreign country for a couple of weeks is a lot different than working here, so no, I won’t be moving.) :)

Amy (as usual) has been a wonderful tour guide. It’s been interesting to see as well what a difference a month makes. Last year I was here in May, and the rice fields were newly planted but right now they’re just muddy plots of land. Last time the only sakura I saw were a few lonely blossoms on the ground, this week I got to see trees in full bloom as well as ones that were just starting. The trees in Kyoto were much farther along.

I did a lot more travelling around this time. I went to Nara, Kyoto and Osaka with Amy last week, and this week I had a day trip to Kyoto with one of the other English teachers. I saw a lot more temples this time around as well. :) I’ll talk more about what I saw when I upload my pictures to Flickr. I suppose if you’re going to read about someone’s vacation it’s slightly more interesting with pictures…

I did discuss with one of Amy’s classes that one of the things that I would recommend to people coming to Japan would be to travel. Living in Canada I had a very different idea of how long it would take to travel from place to place. Taking the train from Tokyo to Kyoto would be rather fast (I think between 3 and 4 hours depending on which way you went) and I really never thought I’d be able to do something like that. In one day we took an express train from Kanazawa to Kyoto, transferred to go to Nara for the afternoon, came back and checked into our hotel in Kyoto, then hopped on the train to go to dinner in Osaka. Wow.

I did find out though, that the quick jaunt I was going to take to Akihabara tomorrow was complicated by the fact that I looked up the information for the wrong airport! Haneda airport has a shuttle directly to Akihabara, not Narita which is where I will be. Oops! Big oops! I’m going to take the Narita Express train to the Yamanote line and transfer there. I won’t have long though! Narita is pretty far out of the way and I think it’s going to take me over an hour to get to Akihabara. I’m probably only going to have a couple of hours there. That’s okay though. If I find the right store I’m sure I can do a lot of damage to my Visa pretty darn quickly! I’m going to try to find either Animate (so… many… floors…) or Gamers since I seem to like buying figures.

Ah, wish me luck. I think it’ll all be okay. I’ve got to go finish packing now and make sure all of my new treasures are cushioned properly or at least aren’t going to break anything else. (I think the only thing I’m really worried about is my Kyoto Starbucks mug. The Totoro mug is bubblewrapped and in a box…)

Next post will be from Canada! sniff….