Other trips

We also had an interesting biking trip to a big Buddha "near by", but Georg has written about it on his blog. Georg has also written about our trip to Tsuchiura to see the fireworks, that turned out to be an interesting trip as well, as it usually is with us:)

Our life in Tsukuba so far

We have now lived in Tsukuba for about 2 months (half way through), and we are finally settling in. Apart from some nasty cultural differences, we have had a lot of fun here and now started to get to know a small crowd of people. I have finally gotten my alien (!) registration card, so now we can finally rent movies (100yen/6Kr pr. movie for 1 week). Not that I at all dislike Japanese TV, which is very funny, but enough is enough. I didn`t think that I would miss TV so much (which I don`t), but I miss chick-flick series, movies and magazines in English sooo much. I missed them so much that I had to start reading chick-flick-books (which I never ever do). But yesterday two girls I met and me rented a movie (Singles), ate chocolate, chips, ice-cream and milkshake. It was great!

Apart from work (which isn’t going in the speed I was hoping for) I have started my Japanese class. I have joined the intermediate course, not the introductory or the beginners, but the intermediate..puh! So it is quite some work. All the five people in my class have done a lot of Japanese before, except from me, so I have to work hard to stay up-float. The grammar is not too difficult, it is just that I don`t know so many words and I am not too comfortable speaking yet. But I am practicing:) And it is a lot of fun!

But I do miss home, and am now looking forward to going home to Norway, eat Norwegian food and see things that I understand:)

Akihabara and Asakusa

This week Edwin and Sjoerd (Georg’s friends from Holland) were visiting us, so we decided to see some parts of Tokyo that we hadn’t explored yet. Akihabara is the electronics-part of Tokyo, and has all the “must haves” and the newest gadgets. It has also quite some shrines, restaurants and shopping streets around for us to see.

The next day we went to Asakusa, and that was a much more exciting part of town. This part has one big temple and some smaller shrines. It was also one of the “happening” places in Tokyo after the war, when they got their first movie theatre in Japan. We had a great day there browsing around all the souvenirs and shrines and eating some very bad curry (got quite sick), and ended the day eating yakitori at a small Japanese pub with lots of beers.


I put out more pictures here.

Trip to Kamakura

A couple of weeks ago we went a weekend to Kamakura. Kamakura used to be Japans capital from 1185 to 1333, and has tons of shrines, zen-temples and one big Daibutsu (Buddha). It is said to be one of the must-sees in Japan, and luckily for us, not very far from Tokyo (a bit more to the South).

Georg had managed to reserve a hotel room over the phone (in Japanese!), a pretty expensive hotel as well, but since we were just staying one night we thought we could indulge ourselves in a bit of luxury. The name of the hotel was Kamakura Prince hotel….hehe.

We took the train to Kamakura Saturday morning and went around seeing the shrines we could see before it got too dark. They have a lot of interesting shrines and very beautiful zen-temples where you can see people meditating in small buildings. They were very beautiful, but when you have seen ten to twenty, you have seen quite enough.

We went to try to find the hotel in the evening, and that wasn’t as easy as we thought. From the pictures we got the impression that the hotel was lying directly on the beach, or at least right next to it. On the contrary, it was lying on top of a hill on the other side, and quite a walk it was. Then we discovered that they had given us a twin room, not a double, and told us in a rude way that we were NOT able to switch…..hmm….we had to do some reorganization of the room.

A “bit” stubborn and very hungry, we didn`t want to give them any more money, so we went out to Kamakura centre to find some food. In Tsukuba we have this amazing little yakitori restaurant that is very good and very cheap, so we thought we could go for that. The food was definitively not all that, and the prize was four times what we pay at home (that is, in Tsukuba). A bit disappointed we tried to find a bar, and got help from some very kind Japanese people that guided us in the right direction. We ended up in this bar/restaurant with very cheap and good beer and food (we should have gone there in the first place). Our day was saved…and we had a great time trying out sake and a funny Korean drink, which, on the picture, looked like it had a living gold fish in it.

We ended our day reasonably early, so that we had some time for even more shrines and the big Buddha in the morning. Well, I didn’t get much sleep that night. I was totally eaten up by mosquitoes, even though Georg helpfully was trying to kill as much as he could. Also we wasn`t able to turn on the air condition…so it was very hot. The “funny” thing was that next morning when mister and misses clumsy woke up, they found out that they had forgot to close the door to the balcony, and that was the reason for all the mosquitoes and that the air-condition didn`t work….we are soooo good! Well we at least had a good breakfast.

That day we first went to see the big Buddha, which is very famous. Near the Buddha were some small shrines in a cave (very cool!), with lots of small statues of some kind. In the Lonely Planet we had read that there was supposed to be a Daibutsu-hiking trail, and we thought that sounded like a lot of fun, even though it was raining and we only had sandals...yeah. Only a short while after starting on the hike we started to think that shoes would have been a good idea on this muddy road, but we decided to continue anyway. Even though we both are very clumsy, we didn`t get that dirty, believe it or not. And we saw a lot of nice and cozy shrines and a lot of nature. It was definitively worth it. After the hiking trail, we found this small curry restaurant where we sat and dried up and got ourselves some food, for so going home. We had a lot of fun, and a great deal of laughs that trip, especially in retrospect:)

I put out more pictures here.