We continue to have an incredible time in Japan – such a fascinating country. Since the last post, we had a couple of more days in Tokyo and then we took the Shinkansen (“fast train”) to Kyoto and we’ve now been here a few days. We are lucky to have the Decaria family, neighbours from Toronto, join us in Tokyo and travel with us to Kyoto. Even though we haven’t been travelling for too long so far, both the adults and the kids are appreciating some diversity in company and conversation with our friends.

Our last couple of days in Tokyo continued with seeing lots of sights, neighbourhoods and LOTS of walking. Lucas clocked another day with over 30,000 steps! I won’t list out all of the sights, but if you want some more day-to-day pics, Zachary has been posting quite a few on Instagram at @zacharywaslander. We are also absolutely loving the variety of food here. The kids seem willing to try anything, especially when it contains sugar, but even otherwise they’ve been happy grabbing an octopus on a stick from a street vendor or trying uni from a sea urchin on sushi. We’ve had a fascination with vending machines, which are everywhere, even on residential streets. A few of our favourite food images:

Our train ride to Kyoto was exciting as it was a clear day and we were treated with a perfect view of Mt Fuji. It was much more impressive than I expected, with its perfect cone shape, and isolation quite far away from other mountains.

Kyoto is certainly a huge contrast from Tokyo – a much quieter and relaxed city, although there seem to be many more tourists here. We are staying in a large airBnb with 3 levels… a very welcome expansion after our Tokyo room. There are approximately 1700 temples here and Kyoto was protected from bombing in WWII so the preservation of history is breathtaking. If you were to ask the kids, they would probably say that it felt like we have taken them to at least 500 temples, but the number is probably closer to 10 – on Sunday we walked over 15km (30K+ steps for Lucas!) to see a number of them clustered in one part of the city. Each one we’ve seen is so beautiful and was so intricately built and now is maintained to perfection. A few of our temple favourite shots (I’m testing out new image layouts in WordPress, I think you’ll be able to click on the images if you want to get a closer look):

We can’t forget the quintessential Kyoto experiences we did yesterday – the bamboo forest and nearby monkey park. The bamboo forest is apparently the most photographed place in Kyoto. It’s certainly beautiful, but generally was underwhelming due to the massive crowds all trying to get the perfect pristine photo. The monkey park was surprisingly fun with monkeys free to roam through the tourist crowds and the monkeys seemed happy and well fed.

A few more days in Japan and then we are off to Australia. Still so much to see/do/eat here but I think that’ll be a common theme of our trip, with us just doing a sampling of each country. Hope you are all enjoying the blog so far.