Nippon!

After a long lull period in terms of travelling, I finally got myself onto an airplane! (The last time was probably when I flew back to Oxford for my viva 1.5 years ago... what a spoilt kid who can't go without regular holidays.) And so off to Japan we went. The land of fancy packaging, colourful characters and wacky inventions.

Sights... Loved the geographic features - volcanoes spewing sulphuric fumes, hot springs which can cook eggs, the enigmatic Mt Fuji which we didn't quite manage to see, meandering rivers, mountains... Gosh, I miss Physical Geog... I saw something with the semblance of an ox-bow lake and I attempted to recall how it is formed... can't quite explain it now.


Volcano with hot springs


closest we got to seeing Mt Fuji, thanks to the cloudy weather


Food... Really nice to look at and mostly nice to eat as well. Most memorable meals would be the one at Nori's home and the sashimi breakfast. I think my mom will go crazy if she sees the amount of raw fish I've consumed over the past 9 days.


giant octopus balls (as in giant balls, not giant octopus)


pretty desserts at Nori's place


grand finale. our final proper meal of the trip - sashimi breakfast


In-flight entertainment on JAL was great! Managed to catch 3 movies on the return journey - HERO, Beauty and the Beast, The Bucket List. Strange mix but I enjoyed each one of them ;-)

Ahhh, travelling's great. There's this ride at Disneyland called 'It's a Small World After All' - how ironic - if the world is really that small, then why does it take such a long time and so much resources to explore all the places on earth? Okay, because we are even smaller. I am digressing.

By the way, fellow kids of 1983, Tokyo Disney is as old as we are!



More photos can be found at: MY FLICKR STREAM

Now it's back to work.