Japan part 1 (at last!)

I wrote a diary while I was in Japan, but it's ridiculously long, so I'm not going to even attempt to type it up. I also took over 700 photos, which is too many to share with you. So this is my attempt at summarising the trip, including some photos - I'll try not to make this too long. This is part 1.

We had a very long journey to Japan - car to school, minibus to airport, 2 flights (we changed at Paris), coach from Osaka to Kyoto, taxi from Kyoto station to our accommodation! Luckily the journey was relatively uneventful and I managed to get my sterile water through customs without too much bother. And coming home went smoothly too. There were 8 students and 2 teachers on the trip.

Here are some photos of our room in the accommodation, although these were taken later in the week when the room was very messy (which I think is excusable with 4 girls sharing a room!). The room was great, but always very cold. The towel over the top bunk in the first picture was installed after I walked straight into it one night after a trip to the toilet - OWW!



The kitchen area was very handy, especially as it enabled me to boil up my water on the stove. However the complete lack of knives lead to attempting to spread butter and marmite onto sandwiches with a spoon (or two), lol:

And one night was very exciting when Catherine was woken up with an earthquake! The rest of us slept through the earthquake though, only waking up when Catherine asked us if we'd felt it!

We enjoyed spotting funny signs in Japan, so here are some of my favourites.
A sign above some taps:

Some very cute roadworks signs:

A warning sign (the symbols in the brackets mean stepping stones). I think this means if you fall off it's your fault!
I think the word on this sign should be 'West'!

A 'no graffiti' sign:

This sign was funny because we'd just been in a castle with several floors. The steps to get from one floor to another were really steep. Most of our group were fine, but I did struggle a bit with my short legs!
Most signs made a bit of sense, but this one we couldn't puzzle out. It was on a vending machine. If you can work out what it means, please let me know!


An odd name for a sanitary bin!
This sign was in the window of a restaurant:
And when we were looking round a temple we spotted this lady who'd left the label on her hat:
We found the toilets in Japan very intriguing. Most had heated toilet seats! And in one place we even found one with a furry toilet seat cover on it! Some toilets had all sorts of different functions, as you can see from this photo of the buttons on one toilet:
And this was a sign on the wall explaining what the buttons meant:
And Japanese toilets are quite different to western style toilets. The majority look like this:
Often there'd be lots of Japanese style toilets and just one western style toilet, so that often lead to most of our group queueing for the one western style toilet. That really seemed to puzzle the Japanese people!

And this sign was just outside some toilets. It's too small to read the writing, but the pictures say it all! Lol.
I think this post is plenty long enough, so I'll leave it at this for now, but more photos and stories of the trip will be coming soon, I promise.