Asia 2016

Long Way Home

Survived! At the end of the last blog entry, we were just about to get onto our first overnight flight, and we’ve finally finished our second night of flying. After the fun

16 Dec 2016
Asia 2016

Slightly Wrong Turn

Waking up in luxury seems to be roughly the same as waking up anywhere else. You feel tired and want to go to bed. When the bed is more comfortable, even more so.

15 Dec 2016
Asia 2016

Boats

To add to our series of motion-sickness inducing devices, today we have a boat! Okay, so we didn’t quite go the 11000 km to Las Vegas, and had to settle with the

14 Dec 2016
Asia 2016

Buses

Unfortunately, not all parts of Hong Kong are serviced by trains, so instead of getting onto the second story of tram, we got onto the second story of a bus. The seats are

13 Dec 2016
Asia 2016

Trams

Our plan got thrown into a bit of chaos as some of us realised that we had commitments that pushed our plans of today to tomorrow. So, on top of getting up late

12 Dec 2016
Asia 2016

Miscellaneous Remedies

The car situation is such a funny one. Coming from Japan, I’m used to Toyota Crown’s being the car of choice for Taxis (even though when I think about it, it

11 Dec 2016
Asia 2016

Hong Kong (中華人民共和國香港特別行政區政府)

Well, it’s been an interesting first day in Hong Kong. Of which I’ll first have to address the really weird quirks. Considering how people usually describe Hong Kong to me, you

10 Dec 2016
Asia 2016

Warmth!

It took us the entire day, making our way immediately to the airport after getting up, and arriving at our new accommodation at midnight, but we made it. And I can finally stop

09 Dec 2016
Asia 2016

Last Shopping Opportunity

Our last day in Japan, and apparently this meant that we had to get all of the souvenir for the jealous people back home. Travelling in a slow zigzag pattern across Tokyo, we

08 Dec 2016
Asia 2016

Japanese Super Advanced

So we managed to get ourselves an invitation to the JT60SA fusion research reactor, which was highly informative (for the physics oriented of us). They are currently going through the process of upgrading

07 Dec 2016
Asia 2016

Fuji-San (富士山)

I keep on being surprised by just how busy some of these places are in the middle of winter. And while it was actually a very acceptable temperature (certainly compared to Korea), you

06 Dec 2016
Asia 2016

Train Delivery

After we have already emptied all our bank accounts, we went on an even more expensive shopping excursion. Synthesisers! The shop only had used stuff, and they still had stuff which went up

05 Dec 2016
Asia 2016

New Toys

So, in Shinjuku I was looking at things that I wanted, but they were all too expensive and not really necessary, and as such my bank account didn’t really suffer in the

04 Dec 2016
Asia 2016

Pink and Hanging Upside Down

Yikes, Japan has got a lot of pink. I thought that that colour would have limits, but Harajuku just seemed to have applied it by the bucket. The place is also littered in

03 Dec 2016
Asia 2016

Shinjuku (新宿区) and Shibuya (渋谷区)

So many memories are coming back about this place, just not any of the navigational skills. Trying to walk out of the correct end of Shinjuku station for example I got completely wrong.

02 Dec 2016
Asia 2016

Nagoya (名古屋市)

Some of us wanted to still take the last opportunity to see Kyoto before we bail, so they set themselves the adventures plan of getting up at 6:30. Yeah … um … if there’

01 Dec 2016
Asia 2016

Washigeishanoko

As the name suggests, some of us were brave enough to try out some of the more traditional Japanese clothing, a pretty popular thing to try considering the number of shops that do

30 Nov 2016
Asia 2016

Kyoto (京都市)

Lesson learnt today, not setting an alarm of any kind also means that there is no effort spent on trying to get up. So today started a little late. Whoops. Going up the

29 Nov 2016
Asia 2016

Wet Socks and Heavy Luggage

Today was a bit less of an exciting day. It was raining, which was a good start. And we were changing venues. Unfortunately, there was only a half hour train ride between the

28 Nov 2016
Asia 2016

Hiroshima (広島市)

Today we tried to see whether we could glow green. Hiroshima doesn't quite seem to have that effect on people anymore. It does however still have a pretty strong effect on making it

27 Nov 2016
Asia 2016

Osaka (大阪市) Winter

After enjoying a little bit of extra sleep and preparing more for our immediate surrounding region, we headed out to see the city that we had actually landed in last night. And when

26 Nov 2016
Asia 2016

Country of Lights

It was far too early when we had to get up, it was -6 degrees when we were standing outside for the shuttle, and after it still hadn’t turned up 15 minutes

25 Nov 2016
Asia 2016

Too Cold

We finally spotted our first Caucasian in Busan. In the train station, basically as we were leaving. We're going to however regard them as the exception that proves the rule, Busan is for

24 Nov 2016
Asia 2016

Busan (부산)

After yesterday’s beautiful night views in the non-freezing night, we discovered that the temperature does not appear to have gone up during the day again. Which was not a good sign for

23 Nov 2016
Asia 2016

Properly Lost

Getting to Busan was the easy part. We knew the Metro well enough that getting to the main station was a piece of cake. From there we only needed to try 3 ATM's

22 Nov 2016