My two week vacation started off in Hong Kong, where I acclimated to the time difference for a day. Together with Jonas, my younger brother, I took a plane to Tokyo the following day. In the evening, my brother and I checked out the busy nightlife of Shinjuku, including a visit to a rather boring and slightly creepy cat cafe. The next day, I met up with my friend Paola, who was coincidentally visiting Japan the same week I was there, so we had planned to travel together. We met up at a popular meeting place, the Shibuya crossing. We caught up over a cup of coffee at the Starbucks overlooking the famous crossing. Watching hundreds of people walk across the street with their open umbrellas was a colorful sight:
Paola was accompanied by a friend, who had been staying in Tokyo for a couple of weeks already, so he was our tour guide for the day. Our first stop: the Meiji shrine, one of the few leftovers of Tokyo's short imperial history.
Here's a huge offering of sake barrels placed in the park around the shrine:
The shrine itself was typically Japanese in its simplicity and the well balanced composition it created with the nature surrounding it:
After our brief historical excursion, we walked around Ginza, an exclusive shopping district in Tokyo. However, we only found one store of interest, which was an electronics chain that exhibited an interactive robot to be used for home care. After a short and fruitless conversation with it we moved on.
Next, we went to Akihabara, a nice area with lots of arcades and small shops. Here, we had our first Japanese curry, which looked... well, it looked brown and disgusting (which is why I'm not including a picture), but it tasted amazing! Then we explored a couple of arcades and some small shops. One of them even had one of those used-panty vending machines upfront:
After stocking up on some delicious green tea Kitkat and other snack curiosities at a 5-story convenience store, we freshened up at the hotel and met in Ueno for dinner. There were a couple of cute streets with snack stalls, small restaurants and bars lined up next to each other. Paola's two friends who we met up with recommended a ramen restaurant and after some waiting, we lined up on seats facing the counter and had some very delicious ramen:
The next day we spent the morning in Tokyo and left for Kyoto in the afternoon. My brother and I started the day at the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building, which was right next to our hotel. We took the elevator to the highest level and had a nice view of Tokyo. It was not the most impressive view, but we didn't want to spend crazy amounts of money on the Skytree entrance.
Then I met Paola at Ueno park and we had a nice walk and tried out some food and drinks. We got a drink at one of the countless soda machines you see in Tokyo at every corner and tried a bento box for lunch.
We also stumbled across a festively decorated street where some sort of temple celebration was happening:
Then we got our luggage at the hotel and met up at the train station. Our original plan was that Paola, my brother and I would travel to Kyoto by bullet train together, but my brother had lost his ticket, so he decided to stay in Tokyo alone for the next few days and Paola and I headed for Kyoto. After a fast but eventless ride on the bullet train, we arrived in Kyoto and had dinner at a sushi restaurant (good but nothing exceptional). The hostel had a very nice common room (typically Japanese), so we decided to hang out and meet some other travelers.
It turned into a rather long evening in the end and we even went to a nearby Karaoke. On our way there, some locals joined us and we had a weird and fun Karaoke experience, including lots of very drunk people singing awfully to the Mickey Mouse song.
As you can imagine, the next day started a bit later, with a convenience store-breakfast and a shopping trip for comfortable shoes, since I had only packed sandals (smart!) and had a huge blister on each foot. After the shoe situation was sorted out, Paola, two guys from the hostel and I started our tour of Kyoto's sights at the thousand buddha temple (Sanjusangen-do). It was quite impressive seeing a thousand buddha statues lined up inside the temple. Since we were not allowed to take pictures inside, here's one of the outside:
Then we visited the Inari mountain on the outskirts of Kyoto. What's so special about the way up the mountain are the peculiar red archways and the many small shrines bordering every path.
Though the sight of these red arches and the way that they wind up the mountain was extremely pretty, our experience there was rather short-lived, because halfway up the mountain the sky suddenly open up and we were drenched to the bone before we could find a place to take cover from the rain. This meant that our sightseeing trip ended sooner than expected. On our way back to the hostel, we still got to enjoy some views of Kyoto's small, idyllic streets.
In the evening, when the rain had cleared a bit, we grabbed a quick meal at an Udon restaurant.
Then we headed out to Gion, the center of Kyoto's nightlife, in old as well as in modern times. This district is very well known, among tourists for its typically Japanese street corners where Geishas can still be caught walking to a client from time to time and to locals for its expensive restaurants and questionable evening entertainment. We had a great walk through the festively lit streets that evening. There were so many things happening in the small side streets, it was lively and entertaining. We saw fancy restaurants behind long archways, that exhaled an air of exclusivity right next to seedy strip clubs. Two guys with make-up even handed us a promotional fan for a host club, where women can go to be served and pampered by young-looking guys. The two guys that we asked to take a picture of us looked and behaved exactly the way that yakuza, the Japanese mafia, would in the movies. So, even though we didn't even visit any places and just walked around, the Gion district left a lasting impression on us.
After we got back from our walk, we planed what to do the next day. Our plans actually had been changing back and forth, mostly because of the weather. As you might have seen on the pictures, most of the time it had been raining and it had been getting worse after we arrived in Kyoto. The previous night, the weather lady had told us the reason for this: there was a super-typhoon (emphasis on super) coming to Japan and it would hit Kyoto the following day, meaning heavy wind and endless rain for a day. But we were still determined to visit Nara, one of the old capitals, the next day. However, we decided to head back to Kyoto in the evening, rather than staying in Osaka over night. People told us stories about trains not running in bad typhoons, so we were cautious about leaving early in the morning and not staying in Nara too long.
The next morning it was surprisingly calm out and we had no trouble on our 1.5 hour travel to Nara. What's so special about this rather small city is the huge park that takes up half of the old city center. There are several old temples spread over this park and the most special thing about it: deer are roaming around the grounds freely, mingling with tourists.
As you can imagine, the deer were used to the tourists and getting their daily snack-fix from them. So, at some point, a deer suddenly jilted forward to me holding up my map of the park and took a big bite out of it!
In Kyoto, we walked back from the station to the hostel and decided to get some more views of Kyoto on our way. We took our time when we got to the Higashiyama District, taking in the refined and polished (though very touristic) sights of lined-up temples, shrines and cute houses.
In the evening we decided to walk through Gion again, this time with some other travelers from the hostel. We had some curry, which was not as good as the one we had in Tokyo and went to a very nice bar to have some fruit-sake. The Yuzu sake was delicious (don't have a picture unfortunately..)! Afterwards we relaxed at the hostel common room, which had grown a lot on us over the past three days.
Well and unfortunately the next day my short Japan trip was already over... We took the train back to Tokyo in the afternoon. First it all went smoothly, but when I arrived in Tokyo, I stepped into the wrong train to the airport and until I figured that out, we were already at the next station. So I had to walk back to central station, wait for another train. This train, as luck would have it, also had a half an hour delay when we arrived at the airport, so I effectively arrived at the airport 20 minutes before take-off. Don't ask me how, but somehow I managed to make it on time and was on my way back to Hong Kong.
Since this was my last trip to our apartment in Hong Kong, I'll take the time to talk a bit about it. The next few days were spent shopping, roaming around different neighborhoods, relaxing and, of course, we watched the World Cup final.
My mum invited me for lunch at a Thai restaurant (yummy), for dim sum at the City Hall (I miss dim sum in Europe so much!) and she had the nicest (late) birthday surprise for me: we took a one hour tour on a junk, lying on a comfortable seat, sipping on a glas of wine enjoying the amazing skyline.
One last 'jog' on the peak road:
On one of my last days in Hong Kong, we planned a day trip to Lantau, first Mui Wo, then to the fishing village Tai O. Though I've been to Mui Wo before, I've never walked around much and for the first time I noticed how laid-back and provincial this town, close to the airport and Hong Kong Island, is.
Tai O had a similar vibe and was, surprisingly, pretty empty. The few tourists that had come with us didn't disturb the peaceful, quiet atmosphere, only the rain was a bit annoying.
To end my two week vacation, my parents and I had planned to spend a weekend in Xi'an, a city which I never managed to visit during my time in Shanghai. After arriving at night, we got a taste of the crowded Muslim quarter with its lively, but also rather dirty, market. After coming from Japan and Hong Kong, I had to get used to the dirt again!
On our first day, we started early to see the most popular attraction in Xi'an: the terracotta warriors. As expected, it was terribly crowded and inside the dark hall the heat from the strong sun collected and made us all sweat through our clothes. Nevertheless, I was glad to have seen the hundreds of century-old statues lined up:
Visiting the terracotta warriors museum took all of the early afternoon. In the late afternoon, we still managed to visit one more sight in Xi'an, so we decided to check out the Big Goose Pagoda.
For our last day in Xi'an, we had something special planned: a bike-ride on the City Wall. What's so special about it is that the City Wall is very wide and surrounds the entire core of the city without interruption. It only took us around one hours, despite the heat, to circle the city atop the wall.
On our way to the airport, we stopped at the Mausoleum site of the first Qin emperor, which also had an impressive, though not quite as huge, number of terracotta afterlife dolls as the terracotta warriors museum. Then, our trip to Xi'an was over and so was my summer vacation...
Hopefully I'll go on another nice trip at some point, so I can hopefully update this blog again soon!
