Japan

Out of all my time in Japan, Day 10 was hands down my favorite day. All the students went off to campus for the day and the resident students had planned to have Nagashi Somen. It was a bit hard to translate, but roughly means “running noodles.” As you can see from my photos, pieces […]

The morning of Day 9 meant me being left behind again while all the other exchange students woke up early to take their Japanese placement exams. In the meantime, I helped out my sister by taking out the garbage we had accumulated from buying stuff for her room. It felt slightly complicated at first because […]

I had one goal for Day and that was get some of my money exchanged. Between all the vending machines, train tickets, and major shopping damage in Harajuku, I was running out of Yen! So I went to the bank and attempted to exchange money. At a Japanese bank you have to provide your address […]

Day 7 was all about getting Nicole settled in to her dorm. Our first stop was a department store called Seyu which is basically Wal-Mart with a different name over in Japan. The store had canvas bags with the Wal-Mart Logo and the logos were also on the cash registers.  We bought some extra storage […]

What are the odds that the day we checked out of our hotel to move our stuff to Nicole’s Dorm that there would be a typhoon. We stayed in our room in the morning packing up until we were ready to go. My camera was all packed up and I was managing 2 suitcases so […]

It was raining Sunday morning which bummed me out because Harajuku was one of our site destinations for the day since the streets become a catwalk for street fashion. We thought nothing could hold us back, not even a little rain, but it was raining pretty hard and we were soaked, specifically my shoes. We […]

For Day 4, Nicole and I visited Sensoji Temple in Asakusa. Sensoji Temple is one of the more famous temples in Japan and definitely one of the biggest tourist attractions in Tokyo. It is easy to find souvenirs and experience parts of traditional Japan in the middle of a modern city. We visited most of […]

Before we left for Japan, Nicole and I agreed that we needed to visit Tokyo Disneyland. We grew up watching all of the Disney movies (as most kids born in the 90`s did) and wanted to see how this compared to the Disneyland in Anaheim since we frequented it all throughout our childhood. So we […]

Nicole and I braved the subway systems and made our way to Shibuya Wednesday morning (Day 2) in Japan. The stairs leading out to the streets did not exit near the famous intersection, but we spotted a shrine nearby and decided to visit it:  We walked over to the well-known Shibuya intersection and took a […]

After a 12 hour flight from LAX to Narita, we arrived to Japan at 9:00 pm and took a taxi to our hotel. Taking a taxi was expensive since our hotel was located pretty far from the airport, but it was worth it since neither my sister, Nicole, nor I wanted to decode the Tokyo’s […]