so as my jr pass winds down, i've found that i've been to a helluva lot of places.  i had collected all my shinkansen and limited express tickets so far and it's quite a thick stack with over 20 tickets i think.  each ticket is worth quite a bit, so i think i've gotten my money's worth.  i'm going to head to osaka on my last day and see where i can go from there.  i'm not going to have a real place to stay, or rather i don't know for sure at this point. 

wandering around has been quite fun and experiencing new things is always great.  i've also come to the realization that i probably wouldn't want to have to live and work here for a prolonged period of time.  well, living here isn't so bad, but yeah, wouldn't want to work here at all.  it seems like i'd become really jaded with life if i were to.  i think the best option would be to get a job in the US where they do business in japan so that i could occasionally come.  by the time i got really annoyed with the work, i'd already be off back to the US.

i ended up going to a club last night and that was quite an interesting experience.  i'll elaborate more on it another time as my back is hurting a bit and so i'm getting tired of typing...

Kyoto

7/11/07

So for the yesterday and most of today, I was in Kyoto.  I'm not on my way back via shinkansen to first get more money from citibank and then back to totsuka.  Yesterday was kind of uneventful since I spent over an hour trying to find a place to stay for the night.  I really didn't want to spend the night out in a manga café since it was raining like crazy.  The most I've seen it rain since I got here.  There was even a good amount of splash since I was walking under some coverings a lot of the time.  I ended up finding a place so I ditched my stuff and went out to the temples.  I first went to ginkakuji which was kind of uneventful.  The area seemed not worth my time since that damn bus took 45 minutes to get there from the place I was staying.  I then walked along the path of philosophy… I think that's what it was called, but since I don't want to make sure right now, let's leave that as it is… and all the way down to two other temples at the end of this path.  Long ass walk and the other temples were closed by the time I got to them.  I then continued my trek to the gino shopping area which was kind of cool.  Lots of places to go, but everything basically closed down or started to close down at 9.  I actually found a little back alley to the adult entertainment which had pretty steep prices.  Couldn't read much, but there was definitely a cosplay thing.  The shopping streets had some neat stuff, but when I found an octopus army store, it was already closed.  I wanted to see if it had some of the stuff I saw back in tokyo.  By this time my feet were drenched and I walked all the way back to the youth hostel where I was staying.  Oh!  Ebi filets are really good.

I woke up today around 8 to get out of the place by 9.  I wanted to go to the kyoto imperial palace, and the tours are only at 10 and 2 so I hauled over there and got a permission card to go in.  It's kinda nice, but the damn tour took an hour which made it less than perfect.  Also the amount of tourists getting in the way was annoying.  I would have liked to go in, walk around for 20 or so minutes, then leave.  I then headed over to kinkakuji which was way cooler in terms of the building and garden than ginkakuji.  I stayed there for a bit and took some nice photos which are on facebook right now.  Walking along this road I headed to the famous rock garden.  15 rocks arranged with raked white gravel all around them.  It's supposed to be really good zen art…  I liked the place and would have liked to just relax there, but then I would have just fell asleep.  I walked all the way down to nanzenji.   Along the way though I ended up in a cemetery since I just wanted to go see what was up some stairs.  I should have probably turned back after seeing a shady looking shack.  The stairs were really slippery because of the algae or moss that was growing.   Once I got to the place, it was cool.  it was probably the nicest of what I went to.  It had a 5 story pagoda, a super nice garden and the buildings were also cool. 

After that bit of site seeing I went to the kyoto station to get a ticket back to where I'm staying, but then since I still had an hour, I went and walked around the coolest and nicest train station I've ever seen.  I ate some tonkatsu which was freakin awesome.  So tender and juicy.  Ahhh.   Yeah, that's all.  That's my story.

6/28/07 

So now I'm in sapporo again after a crappy night sleeping outside in wakkanai.  It was okay at first but then it got cold.  Considering that it's right next to the ocean, that wasn't surprising.  The cold wasn't bad at first so I only put on my sweater, but then the wind picked up and my legs started freezing.  Just to say, I didn't get a very good nights rest because of that.  At 7:10 my train left that place and I came down to asahikawa and transferred to a train that took me to kamikawa.  From there I took the bus to my next desination which was the sounkyo onsen in the daisetsuzan national park.  I walked a bitchload to check out some waterfalls and a mountain.  I actually was going to climb up the mountain in my normal shoes, but then the snow kinda hampered that.  I kept slipping and if I did actually make it all the way to the top, I would probably have ended up breaking my neck coming down.  I later saw that they were selling some heavy duty walking sticks which would have made things way easier.  After I got back down from trying to climb the mountain (I had to take two trams as well) it started pouring and so I decided to just go to the public bath.  Nice outside thing with a sauna too. 

I was actually planning on staying the night there at the youth hostel, but then I decided against that I ran to catch a bus that would take me to a train station to get to where I am now.  I didn't really want to stay there that much since I wouldn't be doing very much, and it's better that I'm saving time getting over here, where I can go off to my next destination which is another onsen (hot springs) spot.  Supposed to be one of the best places in japan to go because of the variety of the onsens and their different healing properties.  Probably won't use them since I just want to go see the oni statues and volcano area.  But we'll see...

6/26/07 part 2

So since I got to wakkanai so late, there really isn't any trains leaving that would take me to where I kind of want to go.  Since I'm out in the boonies, if I took another train somewhere, I would arrive at a new place, but then I might not be able to get to where I want.  Kinda sucks.  So basically I'm stuck at this hole in the wall train station until 7:10am tomorrow morning.  No internet, no real food, nothing.  Walking around was kinda neat, but really, way too much work for not much of anything.  I basically saw all I wanted to within an hour or so.  So it took me 5 hours to get here, 1 hour to look around, 1 hour to come back, and now I have to wait for 10 hours to get to ride a train that will take another 3-4 hours or so to get to where I want.  Great huh?  Yeah, I know it is.

6/26/07

So while my pictures are uploading to the computer I'm going to write in this journal.  So I flew into japan on the 21st and spent a few nights with kay and mel in their housing complex.  Since I wasn't really supposed to stay there, I had to sneak in/out occasionally. 

As you might have already seen, I have tons of photos which are mostly random, but some are pretty cool I think.  I mean, the randomness of the pictures kinda summarizes my trip here so far.  It's so f'ing random with the weirdest things in every nook and cranny.  It's not just in tokyo too, so that's why it is even more strange.

Yesterday I activated my JR pass which gives me basically free reign over their train system.  I also get reserved seats which is actually what is allowing me to be typing this right now.   I get a pretty good little space of my own on most trains. 

On Monday I started my way to hokkaido and finally got into sapporo at 7am… this is pretty long considering I was travelling basically 11 hours since I couldn't get on the reserved seats for the faster trains to sapporo. 

When I got there, I went to the sapporo beer garden and got some beer.  The tours already ended for the day, so I might just go that another time.  Not sure considering it's a bitch of a walk to that place from the station, especially with my 40+ pound bag always attached to me.  After that I headed over to the shopping street but considering that I got there so late, the stores were already closed.  There's this weird tanuki thing that I'm sure is supposed to have some significance considering it had its own little shrine space, but since I can't read a lot of japanese, I don't know for sure.  After that I went over and stayed in a capsule hotel.  Kinda expensive considering the living conditions but not really that bad.

This morning I headed over to hokkaido university to look around.  It's not considerably huge, but it's not that tiny either.  There's this little alley in sapporo which has like 8 ramen restaurants too, so I ate there.

I'm now on a train to the northern most part of japan and specifically a city called wakkanai.  I'm not really sure if I want to go to the northern most cape since then I would probably need to take a bus up there.  This train ride is already long enough with a estimated time of 5 or so hours. 

I'm not sure when I can post this considering that my internet supply is rather sporadic.  I would have thought free wireless networks would be more abundant, especially at universities, but I guess not.