Thursday 27 December 2012

Tour Highlights - First stop Tsukiji Fish Market and Takayama.

I absolutely love this picture! This fish has an evil look in his eyes, but it you look closely his mouth seems to take the shape of a very happy fishy. It's like he's thinking -

"Yo! I may have been born with an evil exterior, but actually I'm a very happy fugu!! ... Apart from the small factor of possibly being dead, but that's besides the point, I actually love fresh air!"

(But in actual fact, there may be a chance that he's happy knowing that if you eat him you're probably going to die - at least, I think he's a fugu fish! - What a nasty piece of work!)



*SHOCK* Fugu#2 evidently thinks so too!

(You can tell I've been reading too much manga! My humour is not yet refined though, so please forgive me!)

m(╥﹏╥)m

If you go to the Tsukiji fish market around 4 - 5 am it's possible to witness the Tuna bidding (although they're not to keen on groups, seen in the sign below), which I would have loved to see, but we didn't get a choice, although, a that point I was only just recovering from jet lag so it was probably good that we didn't! I guess I could go and see it now, but I don't like fish anyway so I'm not overly bothered. Speaking of not liking fish, although there were fish cuts and severed heads everywhere, I don't recall it being a deadly smell! I was as shocked at my fellow out of focus Fugu#2! Here's a few more pictures for you to enjoy.






After exploring Tokyo a bit more (we went to the Sumo Arena but there was nothing majorly interesting happening and we weren't allowed to take photographs inside, so there's nothing good to show from it apart from this one picture of the outside) we made our way to Takayama.

If you refer to the map on my first blog post, you'll see the Takayama is a bit north of Tokyo and according to our tour leaders watch, it was also 900m above sea level, so figured it would be pretty cold, but nothing prepared me for what I was about to see! But I shall start from the beginning.

So after we were seated on the bullet train we quickly left the metropolis that is Tokyo and headed towards the countryside, which turned out to be amazingly beautiful and provided hours of frustrating photography attempts where I would have the perfect shot and BAM! a tree in the way, which subsequently left a blurry mess in the forground of my photographs, but a couple came out nice and I was happy with these two,




And then the worst happened, that beautiful green sunny countryside that I loved so much turned into my worst nightmare .... Dun dun DUUUUN! The white scenery of doom!!! I have to admit though, it was very pretty!


Snow was the last thing I had expected whilst in Japan (although saying that, it hadsnowed on the 29th of feb in Tokyo so I should have expected it really) but luckily I had packed clothes that could be layered, and I had invested in some nice sturdy boots which I have worn practically every day and have received no blisters from. So currently those boots are my best friends.

Although I wouldn't say that the snow had dampened my mood, it wasn't exactly going to make me uber excited either, but luckily, the accommodation did that for me instead. It wasn't just the traditional style that was awesome, it also included an onsen (a must do if you're heading for Japan) which, for obvious reasons, I couldn't take a photograph of (;へ:)


Whilst there, we did the typical temple hopping that I wont bother typing out because there were many temples which were better than the Takayama Temples, and although they were all very nice, you'd get bored of reading my blog if I wrote about every single one. In fact, during the tour we actually got slightly bored of seeing temples and most of us decided to shop instead of going to see more!