We decided to get up REALLY early this morning to head down and see if we could check out the Tuna Auction at the Tsukiji fish market. We knew that they were only letting 140 people in, so we got up at 3:30 and were at the market by 4:10. We were already in the second group and by 4:20 they had reached their maximum and were turning people away. They must have turned away 75+ people while we were there. Finally, at 5:40, we got to head into the auction area. The...

We awoke early this morning to join the monks in their 6 am prayer service. The service was basically the monks chanting a set of devotional mantras. It was about 40 minutes long, but Kent only stayed for about 15, as the smell of the incense was giving him a bad headache. Christine stayed to the end and enjoyed it. After the service, breakfast was served and again, it was a vegetarian meal. Kent struggled this morning as none of the food was tasting very good t...

Our last day in Tokyo was also the first full day of our Oxalis Adventures tour. We started out the day with breakfast at the hotel since they had a nice western style buffet. We could have had a Japanese style breakfast, but figured we would be having lots of those in the upcoming days. We then met up with our group to head out for the day. One of our first stops of the day was the Mitsukoshi department store, which is a very traditional, high-end Japanese stor...

After sleeping for about 12 hours, we awoke for our first full day in Japan. It took us a while to get going, so we did a little bit of laundry in the bathroom sink and tried to figure out what we wanted to do. We were both still a little tired from all the plane travel, so we didn't want to do a ton of walking. We decided to try and figure out the subway so that we could go and see a Japanese professional baseball game between the Tokyo Yakult Swallows and the ...

After killing 5 hours in the Korean Airlines Prestige lounge at the Seoul Airport (Incheon), we boarded our flight for Tokyo, Japan. It was a quick 2-hour flight, but they still served us a hot meal of Shrimp stir-fry, cold tofu, pickled radishes (which we also had on the flight from Toronto to Seoul, and they are awesome!), and pineapple. Since we had stuffed ourselves in the lounge at the airport (not knowing if we would get food on the plane) and it was only 1...