Naha Marathon (December 2011)

The Naha Marathon is one of the largest marathons in Japan, with up to 25,000 runners! It was a perfect day for a race this year :)

The costumes were the BEST we've ever seen!! A lot of people were wearing costumes that said "がんばって日本", or "Ganbatte Nippon" which is like saying..."Good luck Japan"... or "I got your back Japan". It is something that has been very commonly expressed after the large earthquake in mainland last March. I don't know what this propeller guy is all about, but he did run with this thing on!!

Another sweet costume

...and look who's right behind the sweet costume :)

The start of the race...

The really cool race mascots 

I couldn't follow Chris around on this one, so I went out for a 2 hr walk :) Found some really neat parts of Naha to explore. Here's a house that looks like it's been around for awhile... While I was walking, I was just thinking about what it would've been like to live here during WWII... and wondering which of these houses had survived!! 

Well... Chris was out doing great!!! Here he is only 400m from the finish!! 

Happy :)

Kyoto (November 2011)

So we were off on the bullet train from Tokyo to Kyoto. The train was very cool. Chris took a little snooze and I was glued to the window... surprise, surprise :) The train was SUPER quiet. Again, no phones... and hardly anyone talked for the 2 1/2 hr ride! When we got into Kyoto, we only had one day there, so we had to use our time wisely. Again, a reason the backpacks would come in handy....

We really wanted to see the Fushimi Inari Shrine, a series of thousands of orangish-red Torii gates. These gates begin at the base of a mountain and weave along a 4K path up and down the mountain. Along the way, there are of course many temples as well. Kyoto is very well known for temples. The tough thing about getting Fushimi Inari into our trip was that it was in the opposite direction of our 'hotel'... so off we went on a 4K hike up the mountain with our backpacks!! Getting there was also a little bit of a challenge. No, Chris and I haven't quite caught up with the times yet to go with Iphones, so we went old school with some train maps and a street map. We learned very quickly that some trains stop at every station, and some skip a few stations. Oops!!! I may have freaked out at one point... not sure when the train we were on was going to stop lol. After about a 30 min diversion, we made it to Fushimi Inari. Yay!!

The tiny train station near Fushimi Inari

The fox! (In Oki, it would be a Shisa lion-dog.)

 Checking out the Torii gates...

There are no roads to the top, so any items for sale at the top are carried up the mountain. 

These old guys were beasts!

The colors were beautiful, and so was the view from the top!

Like always, we wanted to take lots of pictures of EVERY angle... but it's so hard to capture!! There were fewer and fewer people as we got to the top, so here's an array of some of our favorite pics of the gates...

After a couple hours of walking, we headed back to the train station, made sure we got on the correct train :), and made our way up to Kyoto station for the start of our next adventure... finding our 'hotel'!

A couple weeks prior to the trip, I found a room online at a 'hotel'... well, it was really like a trailer motel??? But seriously, it was one of the most awesome experiences of our life... After I booked the room, I received an email from the owner of the hotel telling us how to get there from the Kyoto train station, and we exchanged a couple of emails on how to communicate since his place was challenging to find. The directions were something like this: Take bus #40 14 stops, get off the bus, turn around and walk 1 block back towards the direction you came from, turn left at.... serious detail lol. It's absolutely amazing how great public transportation is in Japan!! One small detail about Kyoto in November... it is CRAZY busy b/c it's color season!! Our bus was packed to the max!!! When we got off the bus stop, the hotel owner was waiting for us in his little Toyota... I think he called me 3 times while we were on the bus haha. He reminded me of Papa... or the cutest grandpa ever!! He spoke English well, and was a retired police officer and college teacher. He rented rooms to college students and tourists in little spaces behind his own home. Our room was a little 'trailer' with a kitchen, bathroom and tatami mat sleeping room. He gave us directions to a great street for restaurants and walking, and even left us bikes to ride around!!! It was so much better than any hotel :)

Packed train station

Our sleeping arrangements :)

We headed out for some dinner and walking on a cool little street in downtown Kyoto. We found an Irish pub, a great tempura place, a tree lighting ceremony and of course some great people watching.

 <-Tempura place->
  Yummy!

This never gets old :) Those flies were delicious!

The next morning, we got up and decided to take the bikes out for about an hour, even though it was like 30 degrees! We had a great time biking around Kyoto... we thought we were going to find the Silver Pavillion, but instead, we found some other cool old temples, some hills to climb, and some great backroads!

My sweet ride

Chris is so visible! 

We stumbled upon this bamboo forest... it was absolutely amazing!!!

We probably could've stayed out biking for a couple more hours, but we had a catch an hour and a half train ride to the airport... also an adventure of its own since I just had a train schedule written on paper that we had to follow. We had to change trains a couple times, but I can't express enough how thankful we were of Japan's amazing train schedules... so prompt!! We definitely wanted to go back to mainland after this great trip!!

Tokyo (November 2011)

Chris and I decided to take advantage of our 4 day weekend over Thanksgiving and head up to mainland Japan. We. Absolutely. Loved it!! We planned the trip on our own and decided that if we were going to cover some serious ground in 4 days, that we'd have to make ourselves pretty mobile! A few of our goals...to see Tokyo and Kyoto, and to take a bullet train. We ended up only bringing backpacks so we could do some sightseeing while moving from hotel to hotel during the day.

 We arrived in Tokyo on Thursday, and off we went with the adventure of only street maps and subway maps. One thing we noticed in Tokyo was that it was super quiet!!

 Backpacks were great for all of the stairs in the subways...our quads got an amazing workout! :)











We headed to our hotel, the Hanzoman, which was near the Imperial Palace. We knew that we wouldn't be able to get into the Imperial Palace, but there was a 2+ mile path around the palace that was good for running...I thought Chris might appreciate that :)

View from our hotel room

Fast-forward to the next morning... sunrise and some pics from my 'run' around the Imperial Palace. I was able to run just a little bit!!! Yay :) It was a perfect fall morning.

Around the Palace...












Ok. Now we'll back up to the first night out in Tokyo!! We decided to check out Roppongi and Shibuya, both popular areas for sightseeing and some great people watching at night. We hopped on the subway and quickly figured out how to transfer from one line to another...and of course ended up walking around in lots of circles and up and down lots of subway stairs :)

Note to self: If you want to go to the yellow circle subway line, go up the stairs; if you want to go to the pink circle subway line, go around that wall on the right, and then look for the stairs. It took us a few flights of stairs to figure that out! haha. Here are some more fun things about the subway...

Packed at evening rush hour...

Women only cars...

And no cell phones :) It was SO quiet in the trains...it was almost eerie!

In Roppongi (Hills), we wandered upon the Mori Tower, which had a night observation area and a museum. Chris and I really just wanted to check out the view, but you had to go to the museum too...and it actually ended up being pretty cool! The exhibit was on modern architecture. It was fascinating to see some of the concepts that were used...and of course some that were not used.  We couldn't take any pics in there... Here's a pic of our cool night view though!

Gotta love the parking garage :)

And the street artwork

After exploring Roppongi, we headed to Shibuya, which has the LARGEST pedestrian crossing in the world!!! Traffic stops in all directions and masses of people cross the street...in any direction they want to go! We sat in a coffee shop and watched the madness for a few. And of course we had fun running across every which way a couple times too :)

View from above

Getting ready to cross the street!

After some coffee and relaxing for a few, we decided to walk around with the intention of eventually landing somewhere to eat. We weren't on any time schedule, so wandering it was :) We were surprised by the number of businesses in multiple story buildings. These signs would be on the buildings to tell you what was on each floor.

Some sweet business names... look closely haha

Eventually we found dinner!!! I know, it's not Japanese food, but we LOVE Thai food, and since we live in Oki, we figured we'd branch out while we were in the big city. This place was delicious!

After dinner we meandered on our way back to the subway... and we happened to stumble upon the 'love' district. Let's just call it that haha. It was pretty comical. We literally walked into a pet store, and when we walked out, we realized that we were on a road with 'adult' signs. There were normal businesses, 'love' hotels, a pet store and obviously much much more! Are you wondering what a 'love hotel' is? Well, it is pretty obvious, but in Japan, you never have to make contact with a front desk...you just pay into a slot based on the hour lol. I think you can even drive in too! At least this is what we've heard... haha. I don't have any pics from our Tokyo trip, but I'll be sure to take a pic of some of the ones here in Okinawa. The road here where those hotels are is actually named the "Love Hotel" road. We don't know the real name of the road...but then again, we don't know the names of ANY roads here in Japan. We navigate by businesses. :)

We were up early the next morning for a run (at least for Chris)... and I ran for the first time in 14 months!!! It was a great feeling...even if it was a half run/half walk. We enjoyed our view and packed up  our backpacks as we were moving to another side of town to stay for the night. Oh, but before we left, I had to take a picture of our toilet seat. If you've seen Cars 2, then this should be funny. Shannon, this pic is for you :)

We decided to head to the Tokyo Tower to check out the view of Tokyo during the day. We were hoping that we might be able to see Mt. Fuji as well! We got there pretty early, so we thought we'd have a good chance.

It was November, so Christmas decorations were everywhere!  There were some pretty funny looking stuffed animals hanging from that sign too...

View from the top (4 directions)

Fujiyama（山=yama=mountain) in the distance!!!

Towards the mountains

Towards Shinjuku (gov't buildings)

Towards the ocean and Rainbow Bridge

More city and towards the Imperial Palace grounds

While were were on one of the observation desks, we had all of these kids bombard us with sheets of paper that said something like 'Hi! I'm learning English. Will you ask me some questions?" It was SO cute. And the kids were WAY more obsessed with Chris! Chris' kids did pretty well...I had really shy girl, so I got to practice my Japanese to help her with her English. Good times :)

We left the Tokyo Tower and started heading towards our next hotel, which was in Tsukiji. So you're probably wondering, why the heck would you change hotels if you were in the same city? Well, like I said, this was a very 'packed' trip, and we wanted to get up to see the Tsukiji Fish Market in the morning...early morning...like 5:30am, so we wanted to stay somewhere nearby since the subways don't run that early. More on the fish market later. So anywho, we stopped for some lunch and saw a cool building along the way to the hotel. We also really noticed all of the 'suits' this day. It seemed like every Japanese man was wearing a black suit. I would say 85% of the subway was dressed up in black suits with a black briefcase...and we usually still saw them late at night too...they were just drunk in their black suits lol.

The suits...

Read VERY closely :)

The mexican food was really good!! Again, on a mission to eat some non-Japanese food. What better way than a Mexican food street cart??

After dropping our bags at the hotel, we headed up to Akihabara, the "Electric Town". Chris was very excited :) We found some really interesting stores in Akihabara...one in particular had some Anime vending machines that were crazy! 500yen would buy you a very interesting female Anime figure lol...and the pictures on the outside of the vending machines did not hold back! This sign was right next to the vending machines... I can't put the picture of the vending machine on here.

WTF? Right? haha

On one of the floors of this building, there was a hobby shop where Chris found tons of model cars. He was in Heaven! Lots of VW stuff :) We walked for a couple of hours around Akihabara...just checking out all of the different electronics.

Paul, this one's for you...we thought you'd enjoy some of these funky lighting stores :)

And these cool circles on the ground turn your car around in the direction you want it to go!!! Totally awesome for tight spaces and the parking challenged :)

After leaving Akihabara, we hopped on the train and went a couple train stops to Ryogoku, sumo town!! We were hoping to just see a few sumo people, but instead, we saw one kid that could be a future sumo and froze our butts off walking around! We did manage to find one sign of sumo town though...

...and apparently a lot of them ride bikes and they have limited bike parking space...

We also saw a cool pagoda building.


















After leaving Ryogoku, we headed back to the hotel to warm up and grab some more layers before heading out to find some dinner. We ended up walking a couple miles...all the way to Ginza! The shopping was crazy! I felt like we walked into a high-class neighborhood...after we ate dinner at the 'Denny's of Japan'. It wasn't called that, but that's what we decided it was haha. The streets of Ginza were decorated for Christmas as well. For those of you from Ohio, we felt like we were walking around Easton! We also decided to buy some winter coats...pretty exciting!

Random photo alert... check out our shower/sink system in the hotel. The faucet functioned for both!! Yes, it was a very small bathroom...just like the room!

The next morning, we were up at 5:30am to head out to the Tsukiji Fish Market...just a 10 min walk down the road. The market was fascinating and mass insanity!! These carts with styrafoam coolers were filled with fish, and they were zooming around like crazy. I almost got ran over a few times. We later found out that 'tourists' were not allowed in the market this early. Oops!! We got to see some pretty cool stuff though...I just didn't pull out the camera much b/c I didn't want to be in the way.

Check out the size of these Tuna!!

Door-to-door fish salesman :)

After checking out the market, Chris headed out for a run and I went for a walk. Tokyo is SO clean! Found a cute kids park and a nice riverwalk.

An Elephant Slide!!!!!!!!!

How to massage your feet?!?!

After hangin' in the park, it was time to say goodbye to Tokyo. We got some breakfast from the little bakery next door and walked to the train station for our next adventure...bullet train to Kyoto!!!

The best orange bread I've ever had!

Boarding the のぞみ（nozomi) bullet train to Kyoto...

Check out how fast we were going... 23second miles! :)

Great view of Mt. Fuji from the train!! So beautiful...maybe one day we'll get to climb it! :)