Japan

Japan Baby, JAPAN!

OG

06 Mar 2014 • 4 min read

Lanterns! Curved roofs! Gosh, it's all so authentic...

We made it to Japan, FINALLY! And I'm not saying that because the flight was endless, which is wasn't really even though it felt like it at times, but because Japan was the whole trigger for this adventure we've been on for the past five years. When we decided to go traveling for a few months (HA!) the original idea was to end the trip with an extended stay in Japan. Sadly our first attempt was thwarted by mother nature in 2011 but maybe it's even better now that we can take Small Paw along since she's already bagged us many smiles with her blue eyes and goofy grin.

Dinner at a tatami restaurant. Perfect setup for a baby since she can roam around while eating, her favorite. Also feeding with chopsticks? Genius.

But let's start at the beginning, the flight. Of course we were a bit worried how she'd handle it but we needn't have really because like everything else we've thrown at her, she just rolled with it.

Small Paw explaining to Fa what to do in an emergency.

She slept for three hours in Fa's arms and nursed on a pretty continuous schedule but there was very little screaming or crying so overall a good flight.

We arrived in Osaka in the morning but with the taxi ride to Kyoto and all it took us until early afternoon to finally get to our house in the Higashiyama part of the city. (Also, street addresses are incredibly vague in this country so even though our driver had a map and Japanese instructions on how to get here he wasn't quite sure where to drop us off. Crazy…)

First order, after a bit of napping, some shopping to feed ourselves. Oh fun! Here are a few impressions from that first evening at home:

Welcome to dinner! Note to self: don't buy that algae stuff again. Bleugh..

Thank you for telling me that I basically just ate cardboard. And cheap!

At least the translator app got parts right… Or our honey was made by a guy with really thin eyebrows?

The next day brought beautiful sunshine which in turn helped to warm us up a little. (It's a lot colder than we had thought. More about that later…) We walked around a few temples close to our house and slowly meandered downtown to one of the main shopping streets so we could get a feel for both the new and old part of the city.

A HUGE tree next to a little temple by our house.

Small Paw and me trying our hands at some fan play.

Not sure if they were real geishas or just women dressing up for a photographer. Beautiful dresses and hair in any case.

The quintessential Japanese park scene, as pictured in way too many movies. Still lovely though.

Also, our first encounter with the washing machine. After some brilliant sleuthing from Fa with Google Translate, we got the thing going and our clothes clean and dry. A miracle.