majamanborg: Cute

Monday, May 23, 2016

Himeji castle and black sesame ice cream

During our stay in Osaka we did a couple of day trips outside the city. One of those was to the beautiful Himeji castle.

I would recommend coming early not just to avoid the millions of tourists but also because after 10-12AM the smog raises and it ruins the beautiful picture of the white castle standing up in the blue sky.

♥

How cute!

Black sesame and soy milk ice cream-I didn’t like it :D Barely sweet and the sesame part had the weird texture.

Back to Osaka!

Night, night!

Wednesday, March 2, 2016

Spring in Japan

This trip was a long awaited one. Ever since I started dating V he talked about wanting to visit Japan. He is into martial arts, katanas… but what I think interested him the most was to see and experience the culture and the way they live. Japanese are known for being polite and professional. We live in Sweden where people take their jobs very seriously, there is no joking around but Japanese are on another level! If you are a customer they will do anything to make you enjoy the experience to the fullest.

When we are traveling in Europe and are flying for 3-4 hours I almost always think how incredible that fact is. But during the 9 hour flight to Tokyo and back I thought of it a lot, it just blew my mind! Also 90% of the time we were above Russia. That country is vast!

We stayed in Japan for 3 weeks and they literally flew by! I don’t remember ever being as tired as I was during that time! I think I was asleep every night before I hit the bed. And it’s not like we didn’t sleep enough but there was just so much to see.

I was planning the trip for more than 5 months, no joke! I enjoy it and want to know as much as I can before as oppose to V who prefers not to :D Probably my number one source of information was Begin Japanology and Japanology Plus on YouTube. I spent many many hours watching all the episodes.

From the beginning of our trip I felt like I was on a different planet. There are so many unique things about the country and you really need the knowledge to be able to understand it all.

Pictures in this post are showing everything very Japanese…

They love cute stuff! That is so not me :D so I didn’t really spend much time shopping at all, surprise surprise!

These I did buy a couple of times ;)

There was people everywhere, in Tokyo especially! Because they are so many they learned to use the space in a smart way. Also, I never saw a hotel room smaller than the one we had in Tokyo. There was no place to hang the clothes and barely any space to walk on a side of the bed.

I envy their flexibility and I have to work on mine :D Anytime we would have a meal sitting on a flour I never managed to sit properly and still for the whole time.

This is such a random fact and I’m not even crazy about the eggs but Japanese eggs are to die for! Very rich in flavour!

I loved traveling through the country. Landscapes are breath-taking and again, very unique! Mountains have all the shades of blue and there’s endless rise fields.

For example, this indigo blue colour, which is one of their favourite colours, comes as an inspiration from the landscape. This is btw Mt Fuji on a piece of silk.

Japanese are very clean and I appreciated it a lot! My husband says that I am a bit obsessed with being clean and having things on their place, which is true to some extend :D I was however surprised to which lengths they go! If you buy fruit and other stuff at a store, they will pack each individual piece of fruit and other stuff in a bag and then put all those bags in one big bag! That I don’t do :D