About a half-hour train ride from Sapporo, Otaru is a popular side trip for tourists (both Japanese and foreign). It is most famous for 3 things:

- It's canals lined by old warehouses

- Glass craft works

- Sushi

This will be a bit different post. Because of timing and weather, the wanderings in Sapporo itself were limited. We always planned to spend a good bit of time at the Sapporo Brewery, but the weather was a disincentive for some of the places we wanted to go; Sapporo is

We had a day to do more wandering in Osaka before heading off to Sapporo. Marie' was off to Kyoto to visit friends and we tried to figure out what we might want to see in Osaka without too much work. The couple of things that popped up were

As I wrote before, Osaka is a good place for side trips. Since we've been to Kyoto and Nara many times, we decided to go to Kobe where we've never been.

It was a drizzly day as we started the trip with a walk to our

Travel to Osaka was a short Shinkansen hop from Hiroshima. The trip was made to feel longer by the accumulated exhaustion catching up to us after a week of ambitious tourism and lots of walking in not always gentle terrains. Our energy level results in not much tourism stuff and

Sitting in Narita with hours to kill, I thought I'd try to get one more post out. I'm way behind, but I decided it is time to give my audience what they really want, some FOOD PORN...

While we've done a lot of good

After the Atomic Dome, probably the most visited site around Hiroshima is the ancient shrine, Itsukushima Jinja, with it's huge off-shore bright orange Torii (gate). It takes about 30 minutes by what is essentially a commuter train and a short ferry ride to the island.

Time to move on from Fukuoka where we could have spent more time to further explore Kyushu - more ideas for the future. Next stop on the schedule is Hiroshima, another city neither Nobue or I have visited. Exploring the memories that still linger there is top of mind going

It was still early after we got back to Fukuoka from Dazaifu so needed to fill time before dinner. Naturally this means more exploring and there were parts of Hakata, the center of Fukuoka, that had some interesting sites. We decided to visit the Hakata Machiya Hometown Museum, a group

On today's schedule is a day trip to the city of Dazaifu, about 30 minutes from Fukuoka, home of one of the oldest and most important Shinto shrines - Dazaifu Tenmangu. It is dedicate to Tenjin, a spirit/god representing knowledge and draws many, many students before the