Japan

New year's eve and already in Japan for 1,5 week. So maybe it is about time to tell something about my time here. As most of you will remember this years snowfall and how the airports handled it (or didn't), well I was one of those lucky people to have a flight at that time. From Edinburgh to Narita (Tokyo) through Amsterdam (which was impossible). Instead of going back home and try to rebook something online I stood in line for six hours to gt rebooked. Because of this I was able to get a flight to Dusseldorf so that my parents could pick me up there. This way I could at least spend the weekend with my family and then drive from there to Schiphol (Amsterdam), to fly to Narita.
When I finally got onto the plane to Japan I couldn't believe it. After being nervous for about 3 days I got to spend my Birthday in Tokyo with my girlfriend (Manami). We stayed at a hotel in Asakusa and the first touristic thing we did was going to a Japanese shrine. After 2 nights we went to her parents house which is a bit more outside of Tokyo, here I got some nice country side views and some time to get adjusted to the new timezone.
I have to say I didn't really did that much research into Japan since my main reason of going was to spent the holidays with Manami, so when she asked me several times where I wanted to go I didn't know so well. Luckily from their hometown we could see Fuji mountain and since we don't really have those in the Netherlands I thought it would be nice to go get a little closer look. We decided to go to Hakone where we had a super luxurious traditional Japanese hotel. The hotel had a beautiful garden and several hot spring baths.
We went out to lake Ashinoko to get some nice views of Fuji mountain and off course some pictures.
On the way back we stopped to see a Japanese castle in Odawara, I had no idea we would stumble upon this which made the whole trip even better.

One of the other benefits of being here is that I finally get a closer look to the Japanese car culture. Since I am doing some research about the car industry and globalization and such it is nice to actually see some of the Japanese traffic and infrastructure so I can understand a bit better why their car's are they way they are (and I don't mean the ones made for the European market).

So this will be it for this year, I wish you all the best for the next.

Sander