Have been spending the whole week last week to organize the 100GB of pictures and videos that I took during the 3-week trip with Wendy. Since I was sick for almost the whole week (still coughing occasionally even now), I just managed to categorize the pictures by dates taken (There were 3 cameras being used, I was trying to put all the files together and re-group). Anyway, the trip to Japan was fun! Better than I thought. Needless to say, we saw/learnt/experienced a lot, and had loads of fun. Trip to Korea was just so so. Jeju island was great, there were lots to see, but Seoul was quite boring (we weren’t able to order any food at any restaurant just because they don’t speak any English). Luckily we had some guidiances there with my Korean friend Boom and Wendy’s friends Sun and Ha, who made our last day of Seoul pretty memoriable

Japan was a totally awesome country. We rented a 1.4L Toyota and driven it for 10 days all over Japan. It was the best decision made since otherwise we would’ve been taking trains and there would have been lots of places that trains wouldn’t go, and we also saved time transferring between trains…etc. (I scratched the rear bumper of the car on the first day when I was trying to park in one of those tiny parking lots in Osaka Luckily the car rental didn’t realize when we returned the car! ) We went to loads of places (scroll back a couple posts for the itinerary, or click here). Personally I love Shirakawa the most because of its really awesome countryside/picturistic feel and the place we stayed at was extremely nice (a house made out of grass/wood) and we had great service and meals there. Kobe city was great as well, very civilized and there were nice looking building everywhere (with great night views at Habourland). Kyoto was amazing. I love how it gave me a feeling of Japanese tradition whereever I went. You can see girls/ladies wearing kimono/yukata everywhere on the street, and the restaurants, gift shops…etc all give you a feeling of the more traditional side of Japan, and their attention to details on everything. Kyoto would probably be my first choices to live in if I get to choose a place. Oh by the way we went to the Fushimi Inari Shrine, which has the most number of Torii gates in Japan! I think they have a couple thousand gates there, some tiny some huge, pretty dramatic.

Koyasan…loads of temples or “Shukubo” (where you can stay overnight). This place is in the middle of nowhere, deeply hidden inside some huge mountain range south to Osaka. This place was exquisite! We got to stay overnight at two of the many temples, tried the monks’ foods (vegetarians), attended their morning ceremony, and wandered around inside the temples and their really nice backgardens (they were huge!) This experience was unforgettable. Shirahama was another place with nice views, seaviews. Nice beaches, nice onsen, nice “Adventureland” (an amusement park/zoo where we spent couple hours at), too bad we didnt get to try out the open air onsen (they were closed the night we were there and the next day we figured we wanted to goto the amusement park instead).

We also went to Nara, and we LOVE THE DEERS! We was at the Nara park which was a really huge park that is full of deers running around waiting for people to feed them. We bought some cookies (for deers) from a stand and we were literally chased by them! These deers were really used to humans and some of them just hit you with their head which is a signal for “I want your cookies!”. There were some less aggresive deers (tinier ones) that we got to pet and took pictures with. Also in Nara were some great/huge temples and one of them (Toudaiji) had the biggest budda statue in Japan. We didnt do much there other than wandering around the Nara park area since the tourist spots seem to be quite centralized there.

Takayama (one stop before Shirakawa) had some great finds too. It was basically a fairly tiny village with a couple streets that have been preserved since a hundred years ago so you could see traditionally built Japanese style houses everywhere. There was also a morning market which sells fresh produce, local speciality foods, and gifts. There was this mascot called “Sarubobo” that caught most of our attention (monkey plushed dolls with many choices of colors), and Wendy and I both bought a couple of them as sourveniers

Last but not least, Osaka! We didnt spent too much time there, bascially just during the first day we went to the Aquarium (biggest in Japan) and we felt rewarded since we saw all kinds of exquisite fishes and sealives that we haven’t seen before. Also went to the Floating Garden Observatory where we had an AWESOME night view of Osaka! The observatory was really nicely built and decorated with black lights and all kinds of arts on the floor, and the floor underneath the top level observatory was another observatory with nice 2-person seats all over the place for couples to make out and have a drink (there was a bar there). This one was enclosed so you can be sure your hair wouldn’t be messed by the strong winds. We were back to Osaka on the last day of the trip where we went to Dotonburi and Shinsaibashi, which was bascially the centre of Osaka. Dotonburi was a pedestrian only area that consists of countless restaurants and bars, where Shinsaibashi was purely for shoppers - endless blocks and blocks of botiques, gift shops, brandnames…etc. We went there fairly late and Wendy didn’t get to unleash her shopaholic power but I think we did scored something there.

That pretty much summarized our trip to Japan. Guess I’ll write about Korea/Jeju island tomorrow…

Oh, check out the amount of gift wraps, tickets, and pamphlets that we got during the trip!

Gift wraps and food wraps:

Pamphlets, stamp books, tickets…etc:

Have been SUPER busy planning my trip with Wendy to Japan and Korea (in about 3 weeks). SUPER time consuming, have been browsing through 9000 sites to look for travel guides, spent 8000 hours on Google Map Japan. Last time doing something similar would be 3 years ago when I went to Greece, I think I spent 1.5 month, couple hours a day, just to plan for the 3-week trip to Greece and Turkey. It was well worth it though. Somehow it’s much harder to plan stuff for Japan, maybe because of the language barrier (even though I know Japanese though not super fluent), also because of that Japan is extremely huge, cities like Osaka, Kyoto, are enormous and I basically have to study the maps, study the recommended tourist spots, see what’s worth seeing/doing…etc, and plan our accommodations around those spots. It TAKES time….>< and since Wendy is busy at work I'm all doing it by myself, even though it is fun, it's tedious. Hopefully the trip will turn out great after all this preparation (about 50% done now). I've spent the past week trying to secure all our accommodations by reserving online, and apparently I'm kind of late in doing this since at some of the busy cities like Jeju island in South Korea already have most of the hotels fully booked for our days...also some Japanese Ryokans (Japanese homestay / temple-stay) can only be booked by fax or telephone meaning I might have to call long distance and speak some Japanese, lol.

Anyway, here is a brief look of my itinerary:
Sept
13 - 18: Hong Kong, visit family, might goto Macau to see the newly built casino resorts
19: Fly to Beijing to meet with Wendy, then off to Osaka, Japan
20: Osaka - Shopping, goto aquarium (world’s biggest or something)
21: Koyasan - going to stay at some temple Ryokan!
22: Koyasan 2nd day
23: Shirahama - Outdoor open-air onsen! (hotspring)
24: Nara - Japanese’s ancient city
25: Nara/Kobe - Kobe looks fun. See this city guide
26: Kobe
27: Kyoto - one of the most well known cities. LOTS of temples
28: Takayama - a small town in the Gifu prefecture that has really cute looking farm house that were built long ago
29: Shirakawa - similar to Takayama. We’ll get to stay at some minshuku (Japanese homestay), going to be fun!
30: Osaka - back to Osaka, maybe do some shopping then off to South Korea tomorrow
Oct
1: Seoul - South Korea’s capital. Going to meet with my Korean friend Boom probably.
2: Jeju - popular island south to Korea. Lots of great spots for sight seeing. Going to rent a car.
3: Jeju
4: Seoul
5: Back to Beijing -> Vancouver

Schedule is really tight, especially in South Korea. Not sure how it’ll turn out, but there are LOTS to see so I’ll make sure I have my new camera all equipped and ready to go.

Oh I also got an International Driver’s License today at BCAA. Costs $15 and 2 passport pictures. Not too bad I guess, which will allow me to rent a car in Korea.

Didn’t do posts for a couple days due to the dead harddrive from 4 days ago…Still trying to recover all the data, at least got my emails back which is basically all I cared. Just shipped my dead harddrive back to Western Digital and requested for a new replacement drive to be shipped. So annoying….

Anyway I did have some fun last Thursday night. Went to Boom’s farewell party as he’ll be going back to Korea. Had some good chats with him and his Korean/Japanese friends, practiced a bit on speaking Japanese (lol I sucked so much), and had some awesome Korean cow bone soup and spaghetti that his girlfriend Asami made, some tasty Thai curry from Yoshiki/Kanako, and some fried rice from Tamae. Food was really good and I ate a lot…with beer and all that. I chatted a lot with Yuuji (Japanese) since he seemed to be ultra friendly. It was a very fun night and it was especially cool to learn about the daily life in the Korean army from Boom and Jae as they had to do a 2-year practicum in the army when they were like 20…

I’ll be going for a trip to the Rockies with some of them next month, can’t wait to regroup and also to take some nice pictures with my Canon G9 The tour guide is going to be speaking Korean though, guess I should cramp some texts prior to the trip hopefully can understand maybe 1% of it…lol

Went to Grouse again with Boom (Korean friend) for boarding. Probably going to be the last try this year within the Vancouver area, as I’ll be going for the final run at Whistler on April 12th Anyway Grouse was so awesome today. I left around 5:30pm and got there in just about 30 minutes. It’s probably the closest skiing resort from downtown. The weather was supposed to be kind of foggy/cloudy but when we got there all the fog somehow cleared up. Snow condition was really good, couple cm’s of “new snow” and it was all fluffy and soft awesome feel As it was so soft I wasn’t too worried about getting hurt so I went ahead to try out some crazy moves that I wasn’t dare to try out last time (it was so hard packed last time we got here ) Boom waxed my board for me and I could totally feel the difference. It’s somehow more easier to control. Not too slippery though even though I thought it would be. Overall just makes the board more maneuverable.

Since the sky was cleared up and it was still bright I was able to see really beautiful panoramic view of downtown Vancouver (was able to see Canada Place and Hyatt Hotel quite clearly), and all the beautiful snow covered trees on the other nearby mountains. Pretty breathtaking. Only bad thing about today was that it was a bit chilly, so we ended up leaving after maybe 6 runs or so. I didn’t really get tired at all, guess I’m improving? lol but I did have a really crazy fall which I landed flat on my chest It’s still hurting but nothing too serious.. Overall it was a very enjoyable night.

Went to Grouse Moutain for snowboarding on Thursday night with Boom (yea my Korean friend is named “Boom” pretty awesome name imo) He brought me a ski pass so I was able to snowboard for the night for free AND also I found out something awesome. I was SHOCKED to find out that I was in fact able to stick TWO snowboards into my little Smart car! I didn’t know I was able to do that until yesterday for some reason I came up with this idea to open up the soft window at the back of the car, and slide the two snowboards into there. After sliding them all the way down only about 1/4 of the boards were sticking out, and it was totally safe when I pulled the soft rear window back down which pushed onto the board and kind of secured them in place. It was so cool! Never thought I could take 2 person and 2 snowboards on this car..:)

I was so happy and I offered to pick up Boom and take him to the mountain. I used to hate Grouse Mountain a lot since I hated lining up for the Gondola (a super huge cable-based lift that takes you to the mountain from the base, can take more than 100 people) even though it’s kinda cool to ride. Well it was pretty empty on a Thursday night so I was pretty happy. I got to practice a lot of the things that I’ve been wanting to try out since couple weeks ago when I was snowboarding at Cypress but didn’t get a chance to do since they were closing. Boom was a really good snowboarder and he taught me some basic skills and gave me some really helpful hints on balancing and turning, a very nice guy. We had a really great time there and we kept on doing the runs until the guy at the lift told us that it’s going to be the last run…lol….pretty pissed off hearing that since at that instance I was going to try out some new poses see if it’d help balancing. Anyway. I left my board at Boom’s place as he’s going to wax it for me for free!

Went to this bandshow tonight at Tom Lee Music Hall with my Korean friend Boom. Was thinking of checking out band Locus since I haven’t heard them performing live plus I missed their show last time. Show started off late as expected but I’m fine with that.. pretty used to it. Turned out to have way less people than I thought, not sure why, but I didn’t really care as long as I get to see what I wanted to see.

The show started off with a Japanese band called Zechi-Mechi. I was pretty sure that they were Japanese not because they sang in their language but they yelled “We are from Japan” for like 8000x times…pretty hilarious lol. I think they were pretty good even though I wasn’t a big fan of the type of music they played. The drummer guy was totally awesome…and he was FAST! I was like …. what the fk that’s unreal….lol. The guitar/vocal guy was pretty entertaining too.

Locus was good. Again not totally the kind of music that I’m into but still I was able to see the effort that’s been put into the song/lyrics/arrangement. I liked the piano stuff and the way they played it, liked the oldish/analog effect that they had on the piano (or was that the actual sound from the piano? no clue) The songs were pretty melodic too, which is a plus as I hated repetitive boring shit like what you find in trance and some hip-hop. I have plans on writing/arranging my own piano music so basically I wouldn’t risk missing any chance of checking out how others perform so I could possibly learn and be more creative on my own stuff.

Boom and I left not too long after the 3rd band started playing. Hated to say this but god it was sooooo loud/noisy…! We were totally turned down and couldn’t stand it at all Might just not be the kind of music I like but I really didn’t know how to otherwise appreciate what they were playing…lol. Apparently we missed the bands that followed but I guess we just weren’t able to stand the noisiness plus I got work to do so it was a pretty good time to leave. Boom taught me hell lot of Korean words/phrases today which was really awesome as I’ve been learning Korean for almost 5 months now and still for some reason picking it up really slowly. Learnt “fuck you” in Korean too but of course I’m not going to say it here or anything XD