We’re baaaack!

Hi everyone! We are back from Japan. Well my body is back, but I think it will take a few days for my mind and spirit to return fully. We had a very grand adventure, on the go everyday. Trains and subways and shinkansen (bullet train) and walking and hiking. We ate really great food and some extremely weird food. I took 865 pictures, edited daily for duds, and filled up a 2G card.

I thought I’d share a few here and add ones as I decompress and sort through all my treasures and organize my thoughts and photos. I’ll share my travel journal too as well as some stories to go with photos. So watch for Tales From Japan.

But here’s a sneak peak.

This is looking into the Ginza district of Tokyo, taken one evening walking back to our hotel from the subway. Very Tokyo.

We took a cooking class in Tokyo with cook book author, Elizabeth Andoh. She’s written several books on Japanese cooking and had us making udon nooles from scratch, along with some yummy vegetable side dishes. It was a great way to learn about Japanese cooking food culture. More on the class later.

We made this spinach dish, which tastes as good as it looks.

We ate a lot of noodles. This was my favorite noodle place in Tokyo, way off the beaten path. Cold soba noodles were my preferred lunch of choice with shrimp and vegetable tempura. Yum! And check out the cool dishes!

I am a food geek picture taker. Especially in Japan. The food presentation was always soooo beautiful. No just slappin’ it on plate. It was always so artful and mindful and beautiful. This was a plastic (!) bento box we had one night on a boat. A double decker, 2 layer box.

We spent 2 very special days up in the mountains of Koyasan at a buddist monastery. Much more on that later. I’ll have lots of large buddahs….

….and small buddahs.

These lanterns caught my eye at a Shinto shrine in Kyoto.

And geisha’s too. These girls I was told were just dress up geisha’s. There are still about 200 “real” geisha’s that still work in the Gion district in Kyoto. These were “real” enough for me. Love the kimonos.

Lots more to come, so stay tuned.