Japanese Markets

While visiting Japan, you can not only visit shrines, Temples and gardens. You have to visit market and early in the morning if you are like us. Why would you visit a market in the middle of the day with all the otehr people. Much better to do it in the morning and have breakfast here. Except Breakfast is far from having bread and butter but more likely fish and fish again. After few days where I really enoyjed my fish breakfast I must say that I was craving more european breakfast.... Our brains are definetely programmed. Anyway Ben even tru the fugu sashimi : you that particular fish which could be deadly poisonous if not well prepared. Well it was obvisouly fine as Ben seems to be very much alive more that a year after ingesting it :-)

`

Surprising Japan.

many storeys car rack :-) well they have a lift to bring the car up and a platform that rotate. Very clever space saver. I should ask them to organise my own house, when I'll have one.

to protect the trees from the snow

not much room. Nevermind we have a 2 storey bike rack

riding your bike is kind of cool but in winter baby will be very well protected. Clever !

they have the same broom as in France

octopus with egg inside . It seemed it was similar to quail egg. Eat ok !

jumping dansing, too much music to much noise but they were having fun

japanese squatting toilet. Quit cool. The seating toilet have warm seat and ater to clean you bum :-)

it is a slide for kids to go down at school. I'm not sure it was only for fun or to be quicker in case of emergency

Japan 2nd Honey moon - 3

Then we left for Kyoto. Kyoto is a very traditional town . It was the capital of the country from the VIIIth century until the XIXth when Tokyo became the new capital.
You can visit there temples, shrines, the imperial residence and beautiful gardens. We walked up and down in the city, took the subway just a few times when I could't stand walking anymore and anytime we were too tired, we found sento to enregise ourselves.
Sento are public baths in Japan and I'll write later about it. It's the best discovery I had au Pays du soleil levant.

Japan 2nd Honey moon -2

Realising that cross country skiing in Hakuba is not that convenient : no public transport to go to the tracks, we left Hakub for Matsumoto, not quite the usual touristic trip but we thought that it could be interesting to travel on regional train and discover an unexpected town. That was a good idea. We found of of the last wodden Castle in Japan and it was free to visit. We also had the chance to have two touristic guides with us both, volunteers, one speaking french one english. 

Japan 2nd Honey Moon -1

Well, well well. My dad and Mum in law spent half of the year roughly in the North of New Zealand. And we gently asked them or Ben asked them if they could come over in Queenstown at the end of January 2019 to baby-sit the kids while we were going on holidays... just by ourselves. Japan semmed the good plae to go. We love eating japanese. I love japanese fabrics. We didn't need more.
Except we had a pretty crap spring quite cold and suddenly my lovely hubby wanted to go to some other place warmer : we looked at vietnam, thailand, bali.... and ended up in Japan. Yeah !!
Via Australia. Logical of course. Our plan was to go skiing for a few days and then visit. However, something went wrong because of my walking shoes.... Not my fault but my walking shoes fault : 2 weeks prior our trip, I stumbled on to my laces and fell hard on my arms. I slightly broke the radius head... Then needed surgery.... So not so much skiing there. And more sightseeing... with some assistance of my hubby to put on and off jackets... My arm being still sore and limited in movement. Yes I did my rehab after my trip.... The trip was more important of course.
We arrived in Tokyo , but quickly left by train the following day for Hakuba via Nagano. For Ben to go skiing. Cross country skiing of course.