My Slideshow

and here's the youtube link to the same video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7eDrcLl1ys4

The end of this journey

I'm home. It's been over a year since I started this crazy adventure and I'm finally back. As some of you may recall, I'm not supposed to be home quite yet, I'm supposed to be in Thailand. Unfortunately for me and thousands of other people, there were huge dangerous protests going on in Bangkok right around the time I was supposed to fly in and they shut down the airport, so I cancelled my flights and my tour was cancelled right around the same time. As you can imagine, this was a bit of a hassle for me, I had to cancel all my flights, find new ones, and be put on hold more times than any normal person can handle (I am not abnormal, I just couldn't handle it). I was supposed to fly to Bangkok on December 4 and back to America on December 20, I ended up flying to America on December 8 instead. This of course meant extra time in Japan.

As some of you may have read in my previous posts, I was planning to spend the last week or so of November traveling and that's what I did. After that I stayed with my friend Eimilly for a few nights, I couldn't ask her to let me stay four extra nights, but I stayed one extra and then just did a little more traveling... works for me! I ended up going to the places I'd originally planned, Matsushima and Nikko in November, and then Hakone in my last extra days since I hadn't ended up having enough time to go there before hand. All three places were beautiful and truly made me appreciate up until the very last day how extraordinary Japan really is. This is what I saw while looking out the window on the way back from Hakone:

Matsushima, one of the three views of Japan, really was breathtaking. The islands there were just so cool and I took a cruise around the bay to see a bunch of them. They shot out of the ocean in so many interesting formations and had beautiful pine trees growing on top of many of them. I also crossed a long bridge and got to walk along the paths that filled one of the bigger islands. Matsushima also had amazing food, I think I mentioned this previously, but Japanese people tend to identify particular cities or regions with particular foods. Matsushima is known for its oysters, which my students had told me, and its cow tongue, which they hadn't. I tried both and they were both quite delicious, although I only liked the fried oysters, the steamed ones were not for me.

I spent what I thought were my last traveling days in Nikko. I stayed in what could quite possibly qualify as the scariest hostel EVER, it was on a back road, perched on the side of a cliff, run by a nice but slightly creepy old Japanese couple, and filled to the brim with junk, as an example I will present you with the masks hanging in the lobby:

Nikko itself was beautiful and beyond the cliff where my hostel was perched was a river with many flowing waterfalls, and beyond that were lovely snowcovered mountains. Nikko is known for some of its shrines and temples. The one it is best known for and that I decided to visit is Toshogu Shrine which is actually a large and very ornate masoleum. This shrine is also well known for having a stable that displays the carvings of the see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil monkeys that are still so popular today. While I was in Nikko I also visited Kogen Falls, a very high rushing waterfall on the top of a very cold mountain. Apparently there are supposed to be monkeys living on the mountains in Nikko but I didn't see even one and I was a little bit disappointed.

I spent two days in Hakone and then came back to Tokyo for my last day so that I could pick up my luggage and say goodbye to my closest friends. Ivan, Eimilly, Eimilly's boyfriend, and I had a picnic in Yoyogi Park to end my year. The park was filled with yellow gingko trees and just like when I went there last year, the foliage was spectacular. Eimilly and Yuki, her boyfriend, had made us really lovely japanese foods like onigiri (rice balls with fillings, e.g. tuna salad) and sushi rolls and other splendid things. We had a lovely time eating and throwing leaves at each other and being joined by a random drunken guy from South Dakota, overall, it was the perfect ending to an extraordinary year.

And now I'm back. I'm just now recovering from jet lag, it took 3 days before my ears unblocked from the pressure on the plane, and I haven't gotten up the nerve to try driving again because it's been raining non-stop since I got home. Still, I'm so so glad to be back with my family and now I'm just waiting to see my sister who is still at school and my friends who are scattered around various states. I will of course be job hunting some more, but right now it's nice to just relax and enjoy being back in a world where I fit in.