As planned, yesterday was a long and boring travel day. It technically took less than two hours to get from Kyoto to Hiroshima, but when you throw in transfers and figuring out how to get around in a new city we pretty much lost the entire day. The first 12 hours in any new place are always really stressful for me. No matter how much (or, in this case, how little) I prepare I still get very flustered and intimidated by the simple to task of getting from point A t...

Today was a trip highlight for Brittany, which made it all the more fun for me. I had planned on going to a large bamboo forest outside of the city but figured it was time for Brittany to scour the guidebook and see if anything else sounded more interesting. We settled on visiting a city called Nara, which was less than an hour away by train. I had already read about this place but wasn't all that excited about it, which is why Nara wasn't on the itinerary. I'm s...

Kyoto has been a mind blowing city for me. It is a little less polite and a little more hectic than Tokyo (which I never would have guessed) but I love it. In Ireland you see thousand year old castles every half hour as you just drive down the road. Here you see thousand year old shrines and temples every fifty feet as you walk to the bus. It's insane! Kudos to the city for preserving it all. Unfortunately, I finally understand what the guidebooks meant when they...

It's been getting down into the thirties at night, and our little wall heater struggles to keep up. We bundle up before bed and bury ourselves in comforters to stay warm, which makes it even harder than usual to drag ourselves out into the cold. Against the advice of every guide book ever written about Kyoto, we slept in before heading out for some temple sighting. Most things close by 5pm here (even the restaurants and stores shutter by 6!) so you've got to sque...

We're sitting on the Shinkansen (bullet train) on our way from Tokyo to Kyoto with a less than perfect view of Mt.Fuji streaming through the window. It is an absolutely beautiful, perfectly clear day across the entire country but a gang of jerk clouds decided it would be fun to park right at the top of the mountain. I guess they wanted to rain on my parade. Haha...cloud humor. We've been here for two days now and I have a lot to write about (it's the first entry ...