Posts filed under 'Japan'
We’re home! After 3 weeks of reasonably busy traveling we’ve finished all of the major travel we plan to do this year. I’ve already flown 100,000 miles this year and Heather is close behind with 70k. The honeymoon trip we just finished was fantastic and we’re both filled with many stories, some wacky, some not, from other ends of the earth.
Our final leg of the trip was in Japan. We visited Kyoto, Osaka, Nara and Kobe, however, somehow I didn’t manage to take a single picture in Kobe. On with the pictures.
September 10th, 2008
Here they are, New Zealand in all of the glory that I could capture in our 10 days there. We drove over a significant portion of the north island. We did a sail boat trip in Auckland, did these Luge things and drove sprint cars in Rotorua, played golf in Hawke’s Bay, drove over roads that neither the GPS nor Google maps would show us, went caving in Waikomo and finally stayed at the nastiest airport hotel ever 
. It was a tremendous adventure and we’re looking forward to our return journey some day.
For now it’s Japan time. We’re hanging out in Kyoto as I type. We landed a few hours ago and took an express (though not a bullet) train from the Osaka airport to Kyoto. Time to go find some dinner!
New Zealand Pictures
September 1st, 2008
There are a few more pictures from these buried in blog posts, but these are all of the image galleries I’ve posted since I’ve been here. Enjoy.
Kyoto and Osaka, Japan
North Island, New Zealand
East Coast, Australia
Kumarakom, Kerala, India
Mysore, Karnataka, India
Sweden and Ireland
Ooty, Tamil Nadu, India
Tokyo, Japan
Pondicherry, Tamil Nadu, India
South Indian Hindu Wedding, Bangalore, Karanata, India
Favorite pictures from throughout Ukraine
April 15th, 2008
Today we visited a shrine and a technology museum. Cool times indeed. I’ll spare you the words, this post is entirely in pictures. If you only see a few pictures (there should be 18) be sure to refresh your browser, I’m reusing the same URL as yesterday.
Japan in pictures
September 28th, 2007
I started writing this big ol’ lengthy post talking about our travels here and just decided to throw it all away. Who wants to hear a boring story about traveling to Tokyo? Instead I’ll share with everyone some of our first impressions before I give the link to pictures.
This country is efficient and things work as planned. It’s pretty amazing.
People everywhere seem interested in helping out the tourists even if they’re not making a buck off of you. The concierge here at our hotel, the Sheraton Miyako, was absolutely amazing and seemed genuinely interested in helping us. She had maps of almost everything and printed out color maps of the things she didn’t have. Thanks to Ben Hartwell (a friend from IronPort) we knew the things we wanted to see but thanks to our concierge we could actually get there!
There is the latest and greatest technology everywhere. Unlike every other country I’ve ever been to it seems that everyone is constantly upgrading everything. Our taxi cab had not only some advanced vehicle monitoring system installed but it also had an automatic door opener (this is what you’re imagining, a piston that pushes open the door) and a fancy GPS. The trains have fancy LCD TVs that cycle through all sorts of screens telling you where you are, where you’ll be next, which door is going to open, which trains you can connect to, etc. It was really cool and incredibly helpful.
The internet is the fastest I’ve ever used. Ever. Period. Latency to the US is a mere 100ms. Bangalore offers 340ms (the lower the number the better). But the throughput is absolutely amazing. I’m here in a hotel getting over 15Mb/s.
The sushi tastes just like good sushi in the US. The ginger seems to taste a little bit better and the wasabi, well I can’t tell the difference. We had lunch at some little hole in the wall-type place outside of Tokyo. I don’t know what this type of food would be called. It was basically breaded pork cutlet, but it wasn’t tempura. It was yummy. Dinner we ate at a tiny little sushi restaurant. We sat at the bar and communicated with the sushi chef via a coffee cup that had pictures of fish on it and a picture-menu he had with 3 pictures in it. It was good, but no better than anything I’ve had in the US. The beer was Asahi and it reminded me of Kingfisher beer from India. Ask me what I think of Kingfisher sometime.
That was our day. On to the pictures. As is becoming the norm I’ve written a bit about each picture in the caption.
Pictures from our first full day in Japan
September 27th, 2007