Japan Highlights

We're back from our wonderful week in Japan, and it could not have gone better. This only reminded us how much we love to travel and how important it is to get away from home and see something new. There's no way I can sum it all up in a blog post, but here are the highlights.

We hopped a flight in Dallas at 6 p.m. on Saturday and after 13 hours and a trip across the international date line, it was Sunday afternoon when we arrived. We cashed in our Japan Rail passes and took three southbound trains over 8 hours to get to Fukuoka and hook up with Drew, our host for the first two nights.

I have to pause and say that the trains in Japan were incredible - they were super fast, and with infinite legroom, a perfect reclining angle and a gentle rocking motion, I finally got some sleep.

So we met Drew at the station in Fukuoka and he took us another hour on to his little temporary town of Iizuka. We slept on his traditional futons (not your college dorm futon), and he served as tour guide around Fukuoka the next day.

This is like "Where's Waldo" - spot Jake and Drew!

The reclining Buddha, rumored to be the largest bronze statue in the world. I was amazed you could hop off a train in middle-of-nowhere Japan and see something like this, not to mention a gaggle of old Japanese ladies chanting in front of it.

A final photo in Drew's apartment before striking out on our own.

Then we headed to Hiroshima and took a ferry to a little island called Miyajima - home of very tame roving deer, a beautiful mountaintop we hiked to and one of the most photographed torii gates in Japan.

Jake's street food, a fish cake. He got shrimp but I played it safe with potato. We're still not sure where the fish came in, but it was delicious.

A temple on Miyajima

The famous floating torii gate. When the tide is in it looks like it's hovering on the water.

The next morning we spent in Hiroshima at the Peace Park, which was built at the epicenter of the atomic bombing zone. There was a museum telling the history of the bombing and displaying the remnants (like a pocketwatch with hdands ata 8:15, the exact time the bomb was dropped, and a little boy's charred tricycle).

This is one of the only buildings that survived the bombing because it was concrete and it was left standing as a reminder.

Thousands of origami paper cranes sent in honor of Sadako, a little girl who died of leukemia years after the bombing. The Japanese believe that folding a thousand paper cranes will make a wish come true, and she did that hoping to cure her cancer. Now schoolchildren around the world (including myself in Mrs. Gary's third-grade class) read her story and send their own paper cranes in her memory.

On the way to our next stop, Kyoto, we stopped off at Himeji, home of an ancient castle. It's known as the white crane.

Kyoto is Japan's ancient capital and has more shrines and temples than you could ever see in a lifetime. We did our best to hit the highlights, but mostly enjoyed staying at the best hostel ever.

Jake being a chameleon at Fushimi Inari temple. Businessmen buy these gates to bring good fortune to their business, and we literally spent an hour walking through all of them.

One of my favorite things about Japan (besides the high-tech toilets) were the vending machines. They were on every corner and you could get cold sodas or tea or hot drinks in aluminum cans!

Bamboo forest

On our last night in Kyoto, our hostel owner led all the guests on a night walk around the city. There were having a special festival and all the temples were lit with spotlights and lanterns. Indescribably special.

Cherry blossoms! We were about a week too early to them in their full glory, but a few jumped the gun much to my happiness.

Then it was on to a last night in Tokyo. We went to Shibuya to see Japan's version of Times Square and the largest pedestrian crossing in the world. The next morning we hit the fish market for an endless display of marine oddities.

Then it was an 11-hour flight home that let us experience what it is like to go back in time - we departed Japan at 6 p.m. and landed in Chicago at 2 p.m. Next post - how to make our favorite new dish, okonomiyaki.