Friday, January 7, 2011

Blowing the dust off ....

My blog has been pretty stagnant lately (my inherent laziness) but I decided to blow the dust off and make a post. Hopefully i'm not too rusty! ;)


The day after Christmas, Justin and I headed to Kyoto (on mainland Japan) for a few days. It was awesome. Yes, Okinawa is technically Japan, but they have their own culture here. A mixture of Japanese, Chinese, and American. (I'm sure there are many other influences that I'm just not aware of) So needless to say, we were very excited to experience the Japanese culture.


There were so many amazing temples in Kyoto. They would be tucked back into alleyways and around corners....even in the middle of street shopping. I can't imagine trying to take on the task of visiting them all.

This street was a really cool street that you could walk down. So cool, just tucked down an alley right off one of the main streets. There were just tons and tons of restaurants on this street. We hit it up a couple of nights while we were there.

While in Kyoto, we had some amazing and different foods. Here is Justin trying an octopus on a stick. I have to admit that I passed on that one!

Some nepali food. DELICIOUS!

And sukyiaki --- basically just thinly sliced pieces of beef, vegetables, and tofu that you cook in a hot pot on your table. And THEN you dip into raw egg before you eat it. I was definitely worried at first. Can you say salmonella?? But thanks to the wonders of the iphone, I did some research while dinner was cooking and found out that the risk of salmonella from raw eggs is only 1 in 30,000. We decided to take the risk to get the full experience. (Justin was much braver than I was....I only tried it a couple of times and then ate the rest sans-egg, but he dove right in! Luckily we dodged that food poisoning bullet!)

On the day that we were leaving Kyoto to head back to Osaka to catch our flight, it started to snow. It was so pretty! AND COLD! It was nice to say that I saw snow before coming back to 65 degree Okinawa weather! (You will never hear me complain that it's not cold! I'm not a fan! lol)

So that's a quick synopsis of our trip. It was awesome. We were able to take the bus most places that we wanted to go. That was an experience in itself! We would have a full bus and I would think, "No way can one more person get on here!" and then we would make another stop and five people would shove their way on! Claustraphobics would not be able to handle a Japanese bus route, that's for sure!
Hopefully it won't be long before the next post. I'll try to do better, but I make no promises!
-Misty

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