Just call me Travel Agent Bobbi!

Asia ~ Japan ~ Fukuoka & Beppu

Once again, blogs have been few and far between, whoops. It’s been a month of accomplishments with my Japanese – I can now do many things in Japanese that I never before had the ability or courage to do: order pizza delivery over the phone, direct a taxi driver to my apartment, make travel arrangements with a travel agent and more. Most of these things are activities I never even had the opportunity to do in English, in Australia – I live in the sticks, so getting a taxi home, or getting pizza delivered has never been an option. I’m finally beginning to really function over here!

Gyoza at the gyoza restaurant in Hakata

My friend Jen from home has been visiting me for the past two weeks, and it’s been a blast. I’ve taken her around to do plenty of things around Kyushu, including clubbing in Fukuoka (stumbling home at 7am after spending all night at “Happy Cock”, all you can drink for 2000 yen, who can go past that?!), horse races in Saga (where you go not to watch the races in Saga, but to bet on the races in Kyoto!), temples in Dazaifu (students are starting to cram, the temple was packed!), a home party drinking cocktails and eating oden in Kurume (and laughing the night away with crazy cousins!), bali style onsens in Chikushi (Jen’s first onsen!), sand onsens, hostels and “hell valley” in Beppu (natural bubbling colourful pits of sulphur water, reminiscent of what hell may look like), souvenir shopping at the many 100-yen shops in Fukuoka (and then finding a post office that will accept the 100-odd kg of souvenirs that Jen bought!) and shopping and watching movies at Canal City in Fukuoka (New Moon has FINALLY come out in Japan!).

Students tying their fortunes up at Dazaifu

Matt’s headed off on his next adventure – he is now in Taiwan looking for a job, leaving me in Japan all on my own… Never fear, with my newfound pizza (and sushi, curry, hotpot, Korean, Indian etc etc) ordering abilities, I think I should survive. Throw in the attention of my host sister and cousin (I have an accessible apartment in the city, a big bonus on a Saturday night when trains stop at 11:30pm! This Saturday night is the first I haven’t been out till 7am, and it was only because Jen was leaving early Sunday that I was excused!) and my other Japanese friends.

At the Moomin cafe in canal city. If you're lucky, Mr Moomin himself will come and sit at your table to help you drink your gingerbread hot chocolate (which is easily the best hot chocolate I've ever had, and so it should be at $8 a cup).

Now it’s back to work, sorting out my parents itinerary for when they rock up in two weeks time. We’ll be hiring a car (eek!) and traveling a bit of Kyushu before heading to Kyoto & Osaka for a couple a days, and then heading to China on the ferry. Just call me Travel Agent Bobbi!

Introducing the Asian typhoon

Australasia ~ Australia ~ Victoria ~ Home and Asia ~ The Philippines ~ Manila and Asia ~ Japan ~ Fukuoka & Hiroshima

So much has happened, and yet nothing has happened since my last post – nearly 2 months ago! What can I say? Once again I’ve slipped into holiday mode, and have slacked off a bit on my blogging. Almost immediately after writing my last post, it was decided that I was needed back in Australia to help out the family business with our annual promotion. So we madly scrambled around to find a decent flight back to Australia at extremely short notice, and came up with a Philippine Air flight. “Hmmm, they seem to have a bad reputation”, mentioned mum. “FANTASTIC, I’ve never been to the Philippines”, I thought…

My two weeks back in Australia were full on, 12 hour days really take it out of you, but I did get to spend some time with my nephew, so it wasn’t all bad. And I managed to convince one of my friends to come back to Japan with me for a holiday. And so it was that Leah spent her very first typhoon locked up in a 4 star hotel in Manila with me, and her second ever typhoon madly riding through the wind to get to our favourite okonomiyaki restaurant…

People waiting to catch a train in amongst the typhoon

We had a whirlwind 3 days in Manila on the way over to Japan from Melbourne… Day 1 we arrived at 6.30am, had a snooze then wandered around the streets – it was hot and humid, but bearable with a slight breeze… We talked about doing a tour the next day. Day 2 we decided to go shopping at the mall next to the hotel, as it was raining “a bit”. On the way out the door, we noticed the concierge had umbrellas – so we asked when they expected the rain to stop, to try and decide if we needed to get an umbrella. He said that the storm would start at 2pm (this was at about 10am). We assumed he made a mistake, he meant the storm would finish at 2pm, and headed through the torrential rain (a bit of a summer storm we assumed) to the nearby shopping centre. Wandered around the shopping centres for most of the day. At about 2pm the weather did indeed turn worse, terrible winds and rain. At this stage we still thought it was just a summer storm, we hadn’t heard the news. It wasn’t until we passed the Apple Store that we found out – it was closed, with a big sign up saying “Closed for the typhoon”. We started heading back to our hotel, it was bucketing down with rain everywhere, lines to get taxis and trains where huge (I’m not sure the trains were running). Luckily our hotel was right in the centre of town, so we just walked through the malls to get back. Not until we got to Japan did we realise just how bad it really was over there (we weren’t watching the news in Manila – we had plenty of DVD’s from the markets to get through!).

Leah surrounded by shopping in Manila

Leah and I spent a fantastic couple of weeks in Japan, running around visiting my favourite places. Amongst a bunch of things, we rode the shinkansen to Hiroshima, visited the Peace Memorial in Hiroshima, the deers in Miyajima, Leah stayed in her first hostel in Hiroshima and we were interviewed by a Japanese TV station at Dazaifu, questioned about our ‘fashionable’ clothing (we were wearing jeans and thongs…). Leah was all set to come to our Wednesday English class, when our student SMS’d us to suggest we cancel the lesson, because of the approaching typhoon. Leah still wanted okonomiyaki for dinner, so we battled the winds to ride to our favourite restaurant despite the warnings… We were fine, and the typhoon ended up passing by us through the night, hopefully the typhoon’s are over for the year.

This red torii (gate) at the Itsukushima Shrine (Miyajima) welcomes visitors to the island - famous throughout Japan and the rest of the world. Deer all over the place...

Leah’s now headed back home, and I’m left to, once again, find a job. Hmmm, better get on top of that 😉

There. Is. An. AIR-CONDITIONER!!!

Asia ~ China ~ Beijing

Ahh, back in Beijing. Finally on hols again! Where to begin… My trip started with a phone call at 12:30am on the night/morning that I was to leave – “do u want to go out clubbing in the city, then we’ll drop u at the airport”… NO! Flight was relatively uneventful – decent food, had a 1 hour stopover in Hong Kong, which stretched out to a 4 hour stopover when my flight was delayed. Matt was waiting at the airport though, so a friendly face was most definitely appreciated! We got me and my stuff up to our apartment (right in the middle of Beijing), where I quickly sussed out the place (photos to come later). Best surprise was the air conditioner in my room (thanks Matt :)).

Street food outside our apartment

For the first couple of days whilst staying here, Matt had friends from his Hong Kong uni staying here – Marcus from Sweden and Tim from the U.S. Our days have consisted of sleeping till about 11, then up and mucking around till it’s safe (i.e. not hot hot hot, just hot hot) to go out. Then shopping, lunch and dinner… We’ve also been getting ourselves organised – first day was spent buying mops, detergent and finding a post office. Mop and detergent were obviously to get this apartment into order (was a pigsty!) – post office was for a completely different reason… Turns out I accidentally bought mum’s car keys with me, and she only has one set… oops. Luckily, after calling her, they found the spare, so I have been saved, phew.

Our apartment has internet access, you’d think getting that organised would be relatively easy. Not so. Matt had already bought a router so we went about setting that up – turns out the broadband here comes with a password – which we have – but it only allows one puter to be hooked up at a time. Useless for us. After a lot of mucking about, we have my macbook hooked up to the net, and is sending the internet to wirelessly to Matt’s – who would have thought?!

Halfway through setting up our net, the power went out. “Hmmm”, I thought, “it’ll just be a quick power-outage”. “Whoops” says Matt… Turns out the people he rented the apartment from had told him something about the power… Now what was it… In the end, he figured out that the electricity is on a pre-paid system – you charge up your electricity card at the bank, then put it into the meter outside the apartment. Very useless information at 11pm on a hot night… Got the electricity sorted out and am now keeping a keen eye on the meter.

Other than our technology issues, we have been shopping, eating and exploring Beijing. Went with the boys and Eric, a local guy, to the electronics market the other day. Poor Eric had never been to such a place with foreigners – the vendors swarmed and Eric was the center of attention – he got pulled this way and that. Don’t think he’ll be making that mistake again. Had Peking Duck for dinner last night – YUM. Also visited the hill overlooking much of Beijing (including the Forbidden City), the plan for today is yet to be decided. Might be a jama day…

Eric, Matt & Tim overlooking Beijing

Hope all are well… We’re in Beijing for about 2 months – if you’re in the area, be sure to drop by!

xoxo
bobs