Trip to South Korea and Japan, part 2: Japan

After a few days in South Korea it was time to move on to Japan. Before I share my photos and experiences, I will first share some observations about Japanese culture.

1. Bowing is an important part of Japanese culture. For example, a train conductor will always bow before entering or leaving a carriage. But it happens everywhere. One time I ended up in a bowing ceremony with a cashier at a supermarket who just kept on bowing for me each time I was bowing for her. After bowing about 5 times I just said bye and left, otherwise we would still have been bowing right now.
2. Japanese people are incredibly disciplined. Unlike in any other country I have visited, all pedestrians will stop for a red traffic light, even if there is no traffic in sight. Moreover, they love to stand in lines when waiting for a train, bus or metro. And they actually wait for people to get off first before they enter the train. It was a nice change compared to the chaotic rituals I experienced during my trip to Africa in January. :)

3. Japanese food is truly delicious. Even though I still don't like sushi (the most famous Japanese food internationally, but it's not as common as noodle-based dishes in Japan) and seafoods.

Hiroshima

On 9 May I exchanged sunny South Korea for rainy Japan. My first stop was Hiroshima, where I visited the beautiful castle (see the picture below) and the Peace Park, which was founded at the place where the atomic bomb was dropped in 1945. It was one of those places where you can actually "feel" the history. Especially the ruins of a bombed house are quite confronting. The whole park was actually a cry for world peace, which is more current than ever these days...
The next day I visited Miyajima, the island where one can find the famous Otorii gate that can be found on the cover of almost any travel guide for Japan. Unfortunately it was raining the whole day, which ruined my picture of the gate and my plans to climb the mountain for a better view. But overall, I am always quite lucky with the weather during my trips, so I can't complain. In fact, a Slovak who I met in the hostel told me it had been raining the whole week in Japan already and the day after this it became 26 degrees and sunny again, so I was quite lucky during this trip as well.

Nagasaki and Battleship Island

After Hiroshima I went to Nagasaki by Shinkansen. Nagasaki is far away in the southern part of Japan, but in such a fast train it still takes only a few hours. In Nagasaki I had my first Couchsurfing experience since November 2014. I stayed with a student named Taiki. Unfortunately he had classes all day long and when he got home he studied till 2am (Japanese discipline again), so we couldn't do much other than have some nice conversations at home.
The main reason why I went to Nagasaki was to visit Hashima. This small island, that looks like a battleship, was very densily populated with workers from the coal mine under the island up until the 1970s, but when the mine was closed everybody left the island. Today the island is abandoned and has an atmosphere that must be a bit like the atmosphere is in downtown Chernobyl. To visit the island, you have to join a tour (with a guide who speaks only Japanese). You are only allowed to visit 3 viewing points on the island and it's not possible to explore anything on your own, but it was still cool to visit such an abandoned Island.

The final days in a nutshell

The next few days I visited the old capital Himeji-castle, Kyoto and Arashiyama: a quiet green suburb of Kyoto.  After visiting so many cities it was nice to be in nature again. Near Arashima they have a lake that for some reason reminded me a lot of Vietnam and made me want to go there really soon. You see, when I travel my list of countries I still want to visit doesn't get shorter but it only gets longer. :)

After this, I went on to Takayama: a small touristic town in the Japanese Alps. This was a nice change of pace. In Takayama I visited a nice folk village and I made a walk through the mountains. It was a lovely area and I was a bit sad I didn't have more time to explore it, because I needed to go to Tokyo the next day. I had agreed to meet up with Kyoka, a friend from Interpals.

On the first night she took me to a game hall near a shopping center and showed me some Japanese entertainment. We took some pictures together and after that we had the opportunity to add all kinds of crazy stuff to those pictures. It was really funny. It was a pity though that at the last moment I pressed a wrong button and the photos came out very small. Luckily we still got the digital copies.
The next day we explored two districts of Tokyo together and talked a lot, which was fun. We even cooked okonomiyaki (Japanese dish) together in a restaurant, because in Japan it's common to cook your own food in a restaurant. It wasn't as good as the okonomiyaki I ate in Hiroshima though.
On my final day I decided to buy a day-ticket for the subway and go see all the places in Tokyo I still wanted to see. It was a heavy day, but I did it all. I went up to the 45th floor of a high building to get a great view over Tokyo, visited several other high towers, some more temples and shrines plus a tourist market where I bought some souvenirs. I was a bit tired in the evening, but it was no problem, as my trip was over anyway and I didn't need to do much more the next day than just sit in a plane and watch movies. Here is one last picture of a pagoda, which is a very common building in Japan, from Tokyo:

As mentioned at the beginning of my previous post, I have visited more than 50 countries now. This will be the theme of my blog posts for the coming weeks. So stay tuned if you want to know some fun facts about the countries I visited or hear the top 5 of the most beautiful places I've been to!

Trip to South Korea and Japan, part 1: South Korea

I've done it! I have finally visited my 50th and 51st country! Will I continue and try to reach 60 countries before I reach the age of 30? Or try to visit 100 countries in my life? I don't know yet. But I do know that I'm proud of this accomplishment. Below you can find the stories of my recent trip to South Korea and Japan. When I return from this trip, I will post a new post, looking back on all the countries I have visited in my own way.

Staying with the monks in South Korea

I didn't know much about South Korea to start with, other than K-Pop and rumors that Korean food tastes very good. So I went to explore this country and see for myself what life is like over there. In my first few days I did a templestay: I would stay in a temple and live like the monks for 24 hours. This means getting up at 3am for a chanting ceremony and we were also asked to do 108 prostations (kneeling down and bowing for Buddha - my upper legs were hurting for 3 straight days afterwards). At the end of those 24 hours, we had a tea ceremony together with a monk. With the help of a translator I had a very interesting conversation with him about how in his opinion we are basically all nothing important and therefore should try to live a life free of anger, greed and arrogance. In fact, the monk thought I said such wise things related to these topics that I must have studied Buddhist texts in my previous life. I took everything he said with a pinch of salt, but it was an interesting experience nonetheless. Below you can find some pictures of the temple complex and a tea ceremony we had with one of the monks.

An interesting hotel

A stay in South Korea is not complete without a visit to Seoul of course. However, since all good hostels were fully booked I was forced to stay in Cheongju - a city close to the temple I was staying - for one night after the templestay. I had no information about hotels so I walked to the first modern-looking hotel close to the bus station that had pictures of decent-looking rooms in the window. The hotel was neon-lit on the outside, I got a complimentary kit of toiletries and a room with strange purple walls with hearts on it, but I didn't really think about this. Nor did I think anything weird about the fact that when I switched on the tv it was automatically on a channel that was showing Asian porn. Finally, when I heard some Korean girl screaming/squeeking at night I thought back about what my friend Jose had said about how I had to try a "sex hotel" while I was in Asia. All the pieces of the puzzle came together and I realized I was in one right now. And besides those few sounds during the night it was all a very good hotel, so no complaints there.

Finally I also spent some days in Seoul, visiting the palaces and a parade with lanterns. Below you can find some more pictures.

Stories and pictures about the Japanese part of this trip will follow soon. I promise that they will be even more beautiful than the pictures in this post!