Spring! Spring Spring!

Turkey!

Rather than a long-winded explanation to explain my absence from blogging, I think it’s easier if I just continue on like it didn’t happen hah! All I can say is that I hope to be more consistent, and make a more concerted effort.  Basically to sum it up quickly (even though I just said I wasn’t going to), it was a mix of laziness, apathy and self-consciousness.  Anyway….So here we are, now, travelling again, in Turkey!

#Keukenhof …

A Spring Day in #Holland…

A nice walk yesterday through a big, wooded park and a coffee break!

A trip to #Leiden…

We went to Leiden today.  Another beautiful city, only fifteen minutes away by train…

Fields awash with colour as seen from the train…tulip field in full bloom…

Leiden is a beautiful city that used to be walled and many windmills still stand in their original places at the edges of the old city…

Also home to Rembrandt, you might accidentally stumble on his childhood home…

Tutus and old lanes…

 It’s really difficult to take a bad photo here…

Many buildings are decorated with poetry…

More tulip fields in the sunset on the way home…

A Spring Birthday in #Holland…

May 9th was M’s birthday.  We had a lovely day in Amsterdam and Haarlem…

First I will show you the view from our rented room…Spring has sprung in Haarlem since we were last here and everything is so fresh, green and beautiful!

We are staying near a huge cemetery with a lovely pond and many cherry trees…I didn’t think I would be seeing cherry blossoms again this year!

There was a fair in the big square in the centre of the city…this ride looks terrifying…

We arrived back in the breathtaking city of Amsterdam and we walked and walked…

This is some kind of hop on hop off mobile bar complete with keg…you have to cycle to your next destination…

We walked to Westerpark after stopping at a bakery…

…and had some delicious birthday desserts!

Spring is everywhere…

There was some kind of festival in the park and there were soooo many people and food stalls…

…we decided to head to dinner…

…walking through the Jordaan…

Authentic Italian pizza…they bring the buffalo mozzarella in from Italy twice a week…

Rose *AND* lemonade together? My dream…

…more post dinner walking…

…the most crooked bar I’ve ever seen..

It was a beautiful day!

A Last Trip Out of the City…Enoshima…

The other day we went to Enoshima: a trip I was planning on taking during Golden Week before I knew we were leaving.  We have been here many times and have also taken visiting friends and family here, but it’s been about six years.  I wanted to make sure I got a chance to see it before we left.  Enoshima is an island connected by a bridge to the mainland about 90-120 minutes outside central Tokyo.  

It was kind of a crazy idea to come here during Golden Week, but what choice did we have? The crowds were insane and at one point the people were crammed to a stop…

The nice thing is, people in Japan do not push or get angry (usually!) so everyone just patiently waited to get through…

The crazy crowds from above…

There are so many steps at Enoshima.  If you want you can buy a ticket which allows you to take a series of escalators all the way to the top.  I’ve never done this, though.  The climb is part of the fun and makes the rewarding views all the better…

…napping Kitty…

Corn on the cob: charcoal grilled wtih soya sauce….

 

Random girl…

Tidal Pools…

Wouldn’t want to live here during a big earthquake…it’s already crumbling…

Heading back to beautiful Haarlem again, on our way home…

A Saturday in #Tokyo: Part 1

Yesterday was a busy day…

I started off in Shibuya where I had a private lesson and then I wandered around a bit while I waited for M to meet me.  Shibuya is great.  I love it.  But it gets super crowded on the weekends.  It started to rain after a while, so the crowds weren’t as bad as normal.  Shopping in this area is super, but the only shopping I did was at the 100 yen store!

There are so many amazing sweets at the convenience stores here.  Yes those are take-away macarons!

Daft Punk truck…

This guy is awesome…

Then we walked from Shibuya to Yoyogi Koen for the Earth Day Festival…

This thing was huge…there was no way to cover it all in the bit of time we had and I believe it is every month or so in the Spring and Summer.  It was great…

They freaking love MJ here.  Last weekend we saw a whole store just dedicated to MJ memorabilia and now the Earth Day Festival had a whole tent with MJ impersonators (which we missed) and an MJ choir!

This is a shit photo, but I just wanted to show where we ate lunch. Loving Hut is an international chain of vegetarian restaurants overseen by the religious/spiritual dogma of some weird lady.  I dunno about all that, but their food is great, usually! We had veggie meat skewers and Vegan Ramen! At this point it started to rain harder so we figured we had better leave if we still wanted to get to the Wisteria Festival which was another train ride away.  I should rephrase that to “if *I* still wanted to get to the Wisteria Festival….M was just humouring me and coming along for company.  He was such a trooper in the freezing cold rain when I’m sure he would have done many other things than gone to see some flowers half way across the city.  

The flowers were at a very old shrine first commemorated in the 1600’s.  Some of the trees are said to be around 300 years old.  Despite the rain, the scene was beautiful…

Rainy Sky Tree Tower…this was not yet built when we lived here before.  It’s kind of an eyesore but looks better at night…

A lovely Saturday despite the rain!

A trip to the old hood…

 

Today we went a few train stations away to visit the old neighbourhood that we lived in the first time we came to Tokyo.  We walked to our old guesthouse, which, while old and dark, is in a beautiful park like setting with bamboo and purple flowers in bloom.  There is the final type of sakura blooming now, which happens to be my favourite because it’s layered and ruffled.  Most of the cherry blossoms are now done and the other flowers, such as tulips and lilacs are starting.  I am going to a Wisteria Festival next weekend and hope to have lots of beautiful photos.  

Getting Settled in Tokyo…

Oh wow, I have been incredibly absent.  I apologize.  I haven’t really had too many spare moments to sit down and write on here, for one thing and secondly it’s been very difficult to express all the thoughts, feelings, emotions and events of the last month for people that have never been here.  So I will try a basic sort of summary and we can go from there.  I have a lot of photos to share and now it is Hanami (cherry blossom season), which I have been waiting so long to see again, so I have a lot of flower photos which you may or may not appreciate 🙂

Again, in inadequate summary, I will start by saying the first couple of weeks here were very tough.  There was culture shock (again! which surprised me given that we have lived here before), jetlag and confusion and major doubts about our decision to come here.  The first guesthouse that I reserved, that seemed like such a good idea at the time, ended up being, basically, a dump.  I chose it because it was small, with only 7 guests, including us, and for its proximity to Shimokitazawa, one of our favourite neighbourhoods, but when we arrived it was freezing cold, dark and rather grim.  We had no natural light in our room, our window looking out to the neighbouring wall, and the surrounding area was completely concrete and urban, even by Tokyo standards.  No park or green space to be found anywhere. 

So we decided to move to another guesthouse.  This one is in a neighbourhood well familiar to us and next to a huge beautiful park that I get to walk through every day on my way to work (more on that, later).  We are in a residential area, but it’s green, our house is bigger, which means more guests and more noise, but also a whole host of new friendly people to interact with and ask for advice etc.  Our room is better and warmer, we have better beds and no limitations on our utilities (unlike the other house which had a very low cap on electricity, making it very difficult to keep warm).  All in all, this vastly improved our mood.  While we still had and still have some major adjustments to do to feel “comfortable”, we feel much better. 

After a few more days I had two interviews and I was offered both positions, luckily! I chose the job that was closets to home and had the most paid vacation, which means I teach small children as opposed to adults, but I walk to work (through aforementioned park) which means all the world to me, particularly in Tokyo where a 90 minute commute (one way) is completely normal.  We are now going through the harrowing project of tackling Visas and Immigration, a truly horrible, spirit crushing experience, usually.  We’ve already made several visits and I’m going back on Thursday, this time, hopefully, with all the appropriate documents.  

We’ve had some fantastic weather already, with the warmest day around 26c.  It’s back to 9c again this morning but Spring is definitely here.  I am so glad to say goodbye to that last winter.  I am so tired of being cold all the time, particularly in Japan where they do not use insulation in their homes, making staying warm an even bigger challenge.  We have already been through multiple earthquakes and a huge dust storm (a first for me) which was utterly horrible, and for which, naturally, China was blamed 😛

We are still needing to get many things for our room to make it more cozy. Shelving, lamps and rugs etc.  But it’s getting there.  M is doing well with new writing jobs, dealing with irritating editors and rekindling relationships with older ones.  His start here has been very difficult but he’s coping and getting better all the time, although still struggling with living in a guesthouse (since he works from home) and just being here in general as opposed to living and working in Europe (his dream).  It’s hard and the life of a writer is a solitary one, so you have plenty of time for negative thinking, should you allow it to get a stronghold. It still remains to be seen whether or not we can make a go of it here.  We have visas to apply for and we are still catching up financially speaking, so it will take a few months yet before that is all settled.

Anyway, I shall leave you with some more photos and my next post will be entirely hanami photo related.  A lot of these photos are from the park “next door” and the surrounding area where we are living.  Thanks for reading!

Feel free to check out more of my photos at http://www.flickr.com/jennpeters