YUP, its finally here! Thought i’d better do this before i work on the preparations for the christmas party this evening!
This trip involved 2 days of visiting our usual places in Tokyo and then going around places surrounding Mount Fuji so we got to view mount fuji at different angles in a stretch of 5 days (not counting tokyo). pretty cool cos… mount fuji looks the same from wherever you see it! haha! there were ALOT of sightseeing, and to make it worse, this trip was the first time where we tasted crappy food in japan (never in our previous 4 trips have we tasted anything mediocre or something in japan so this was a huge disappointment), and it wasn’t just once, it was A FEW TIMES. good thing my bro wasnt there to experience it haha!
Day 1 - 17th Nov (Monday)
Arrived at Changi airport at about 3plus am, sent emails to friends before boarding the plane………..
Arrived at Narita at about 2pm. The air smelt pollution-free and really fresh! temp’s about 17deg so it was okay… Started rushing my mum to get out of the customs asap so we could catch the bus to get to Shinjuku(not the red light district section!=D)! the bus ride was lonnnggg as usual.. and soon we arrived at Shinjuku Washington. Found my dad and we headed off quickly to one of the places we frequent for dinner in Shinjuku (no Ajisen this time=(( ) had my first meal and it was awesome blossom - salmon tempura don with zaru udon and katsu don!XD good start to a good trip!
after dinner we headed to Harajuku, a popular place for jap teenagers (there’s ALOT of cosplay going on there on sunday afternoons! kids will just fill up the entire subway station in all sorts of nonsense costumes!) A cool thing about Harajuku is that it’s kinda divided into two places, one area has high-end shops like Louis Vuitton and all that, while the other area houses street shops (a mix between chinatown and far east) which sells slightly cheaper stuff that appeals more to students. I went to the newly-opened H&M which was pretty cool - you have to queue up about a few hundred metres away from the shop, then the staff will bring batches of people to the front of the shop where there are barriers. when more people leave the shop, the staff will open the barriers to let you in! haha quite funny lah, cos i think the shop’s super overcrowded! the things there were pretty ex cos there were comme des garcons clothings and stuff! managed to get out buying something though, so the queue was worth it!=)
after somemore shopping, we headed to the street shops and i bought lolita-themed _____ (ahem), and some accessories and stuff! lost my dad for a while and then we headed back to shinjuku to eat ramen again (ughh pig) had my favourite cold ramen with hot soup to dip in!=)
DAY 2
went to collect the car with my dad (the guy was super cute, he looked abit like okada junichi omg) and drove to kamakura! did alot of sightseeing in the traditional part of japan (eg engakuji) before heading to Atami. ate at skylark (YESSSS!!!) and had a hamburg+japanese breakfast set! awesome blossom! checked into Ito Hotel where there was this super enthu guy who ran out to our car and after he realized we could only speak english, he ran into the hotel and got another guy to come out to tell us where to park!
the “english-speaking” guy was super funny - was trying to explain the places to go to eat and where the onsen was and stuff. kept going “yes… yes…” so i was trying not to laugh hehehe! there was also internet access in the hotel so i rushed to check my email and email back my friends and stuff (=D) had our dinner before driving out to find somewhere to shop. ended up at yaohan(omg memories from singapore) after a 20-min drive! bought ice-cream and headed back for the onsen! changed into the yukata which looks like this:
DAY 3
Had our breakfast at the hotel before heading to this suspension bridge in saki-something which looked like this:
my mum was proving her lack of height-phobia by jumping on the bridge to freak my dad and me out wth! it was quite funny! headed for hakone but stopped by this restaurant which said NOODLES (in jap lah obviously) so we went in. the guy came to us when we were thinking of what to eat and asked if we understood jap so i said not really (all this time the convo we had was in japanese) and he pointed to some stuff and explained what it was (the thing is.. i cant read jap but i may understand if i listen [which it was like that for french ahem ahem] so if someone were to read me the menu i would know what the food is) the problem was this guy pointed to the kanji words “chao3 fan4″ (fried rice) and said, “kore wa(”this is” in jap)… *thinks*char peng(”fried rice” in HOKKIEN!)” so we got a shock that he was speaking hokkien. then when i pointed to some food and clarified it in jap, he’d try to explain what the food was to me in jap+broken hokkien like i was some kinda idiot/japan noob. felt kinda irritated. i mean i know what RAMEN is (noodles!!), i was just clarifying that the jap words meant “ramen”, that’s it. so that guy asked us if we were from malaysia (in broken jap AGAIN) and we said nope, singapore. then WE asked him where (wts) he was from and he said Taiwan. OKAY… so much for pretending you’re some jap who can only speak a little bit of broken hokkien.
so we ordered 2 bowls of ramen (1 miso, 1 shoyu), fried rice and gyoza. then the guy came and served this sorta steamed wanton kinda thing and told us how we should dip the wanton into the sauce and eat it (thanks smart-ass) we thought it was some kinda appetizer he was letting us sample so we were like okay, quite generous… but after a while, we realized the gyoza didnt appear, so my dad and i figured THAT was the gyoza while my mum being optimistic, was waiting for the gyoza lol.
so he came over and asked if everything was okay, and my dad pointed to the wanton and asked if it was gyoza and he was going “hai hai… kore wa… original!” i wanted to dump the vinegar on his head lah seriously. he seriously thought we were damn stupid and sua ku. wah lao i was damn pissed. so we left the place and headed to hatago ichinoyu (and before that checked out mount fuji and i hunted for my bro’s mononoke hime and bought it! dvds in jap are super ex btw!)
hatago ichinoyu is a pretty cool traditional hotel with onsen. the guy’s english was pretty imba and he looked like my “bus uncle” in sec school hahaha! first we headed for onsen before having dinner in the dining hall with this other guy who could speak english really well too! had shabu shabu with an appetizer, flavoured rice, miso soup (made from scratch) and a yuzu sherbet to end it all off. awesome blossom… extra awesome! my parents were gushing about how cute the waiter was (which was quite funny) and how they think he was hitting on me just because he asked me if i wanted more rice and not them. actually it was cos being a pig, i just ate faster haha.
a cool thing about this hotel is that it allows private onsen from 11pm-6am so we were planning to go for it in the early morning. the hotel’s situated in a pretty ulu place so we couldnt go out… ended up sleeping at 9pm!
DAY 4
woke up at 4+am to go for the onsen. because it was kinda weird and stuff with my dad so i wanted to wear my two-piece, which i forgot and left in the car with my main luggage. so my parents went to the onsen first and i had to go (in my yukata) through this dark corridor and then out into the carpark (which was freezing cold) to get to the car. the moment i stuck my hand into the luggage, my whole hand turned numb so i couldnt really feel the two-piece properly lol. after that i ran back to the onsen and joined my parents! haha quite dramatic!
drove out of the hotel after our onsen to search for lallangs which my dad insisted on taking pictures of. it was freezing cold and the stupid Gap trench coat i got was doing nothing but making me colder! met a really hyperactive dog called lana which responds to english commands! kinda cool! it was jumping all over the place! tried to take a picture with it but it was moving about so the picture was kinda blurry:
got back to the hotel later to warm up before going for some traditional jap breakfast in the dining hall! had saba yaki, rice, miso soup, seaweed, potato salad, cold fishcake and cold cooked sweet omelette! yum=D
checked out after breakfast and drove to this place which had a great view of mount fuji before visiting the usual gotemba (:D) bought some stuff, including godiva biscuits which were VERY DELICIOUS=) had katsu curry don before we left for kofu, shinshu. before that we stopped by lake tanuki cos my wanted to take some pictures. awesome awesome scenery and a great view of mount fuji:
things after that got pretty dramatic…
so we were in the middle of nowhere heading towards kobuchisawa, with forests around us and stuff when we realized that we were running out of petrol(the last bar was blinking on the car screen) there were only a few cars around and it was already dark.
so we continued driving in silence, trying not to panic. we did everything we could to save petrol like turning off the air-con and stuff. finally my dad came to a stop and said that we should all make a more informed decision. so we took out the map and studied it. we had two ways - one was to head back towards the lake and keep going backwards till we reach the previous city we visited, or to go on forward till we reach our targeted city for the day. everyone was calculating the distance and stuff and i remembered seeing this poster on petrol-saving when my dad and i were at the car rental where i learnt that our car could drive up to (cantrmb)km so we were looking at how much we have drove and calculated how much more we could drive… settled on driving forward in the end. so we continued to drive and suddenly out of nowhere, i saw this run-down looking place with a sign in front that had yen characters on it so i started shouting PETROL KIOSK!!! and when we got closer, i realized it MAY not be a petrol kiosk so i was like NO ITS NOT! then my mum said it was and we rushed there and everyone heaved a huge sigh of relief. like omgwtwsrlsy!?
after the trauma everyone got quite high and started laughing at my mum being MHP again (”i was very calm cos i was praying! i knew we would be fine one!”) then my dad was suggesting stuff like the petrol kiosk could’ve sprung up by SOMEONE UP THERE since it looked really temporary and stuff! and we were talking about different sources of help from UP THERE, like mount fuji(which is said to be sacred, fyi=D) and of course, murphy’s law was proven yet once again - we passed 10,000 petrol kiosks after that!
DAY 5
had continental breakfast in the hotel before driving to shosenkyo! it was pretty chilly but i switched to my uniqlo jacket so it wasnt cold to me yay!=) there was alot of walking and climbing but the scenery was awesome:
my dad and i goofing around heh!
found this traditional place for lunch and had one of the BEST katsu don i’ve ever eaten in my life! the katsu had a slight amount of fat in it and it was heaven=)
drove down to a place called hachino-sth and it was kinda like outlets in the middle of a forest. it was really dark and shops were closing so we were chionging like crazy. as we were leaving, we realized that it started snowing which was pretty cool cos we weren’t expecting snow where we were at that time!
found another traditional place for dinner which served sukimen, a famous dish in shinshu. decided to try the sukimen and it… sucked=( my dad ordered tororo don which looked like gruel (okay i was being nice… i meant vomit) and it was even worse! so we headed for our hotel with our unsatisfied stomaches to rest for the night=(
DAY 6
had our breakfast at the hotel again before checking out! headed all the way back to tokyo… a pretty long ride i must say! stopped by lake tanuki again and we had a “picnic”! opened up the bottle of PURE(i mean it) kyoho grape juice we got from shosenkyo and drank it while soaking in the atmosphere. the grape juice was imbax pls! it tasted like wine cos the grape was really insane!
i really like this shot=)
went to this giant supermarket place (cant rmb the name) and bought lots of mikans and sa-sth fuji apples! very awesome! took quite a long time and we were stuck in a heavy jam so we arrived in tokyo pretty late!=( returned the car and checked into shinjuku washington again! went to ike(my fave!) and my dad bought an agnes b. bag for my mum tskk. shopped around and i bought a few shiseido stuff (majolica majorca yes!!) reached the hotel very very late and started packing up to leave for the next day=((
DAY 7
checked out of the hotel and shopped around shinjuku. found the red light district area which looked kinda scary (though i didnt see any yakuza) so i didnt go in. visited some yaofangs and bought last minute stuff! had our last meal in tokyo before heading to narita airport!
reached narita early and shopped around. found out our flight delayed by an hour (xiannnnn) so we had to stone around. bought royce chocolates (YES!) and lots of ramen!
it was finally time to board the plane when we heard an announcement. turns out the flight exceeded its limit so they were looking for one passenger to give up his ticket for the flight the next day. they’ll make compensations with food, accommodation and a business class seat. got a bit excited and thought of doing that. but to put everything short, we didnt do it in the end=(
the flight was disastrous, long, slow and filled with turbulence. it was pretty bad and i was happy to reach home! the trip had been awesome with a few hiccups here and there but i feel really lucky to have visited this fine country again!=)
so there you go, my 5th trip to japan! by the way this post has been stretched out from 24th-26th december, with my party, christmas celebration and watching australia getting in the way. btw the party was excellent, waraku kinda disappointed and Australia is definitely a must-see movie=) Merry christmas everyone, and all the best to us who’ve not finished even 10% of their work! we need to do something!!!:O
imchucked
