Parents in Japan!!

(by Ben)
Kailey's parents came to Japan for 3 weeks this summer! This post shows what we did in the first week.

Kailey's parents landed in Narita international airport at 3pm August 7th. Kailey and I came from Kyoto that morning, met with a friend of mine in Tokyo, picked up parents in Narita (Narita is about 1hr from Tokyo), then traveled back with some extremely jet-lagged parents back to downtown Tokyo in mild rush-hour-like conditions.

I made a slideshow of our first week in Japan.

Our first week started in Tokyo and ended at our apartment in Kyoto. It was spent touring the mountains (Japanese Alps) in between the two major cities.

We spent two days in Tokyo then went by bullet train to Hakone-Yumoto (1.5hrs). We toured the mountains there, saw mt. Fuji from a gondola suspended between two mountain peaks, rode a pirate ship, and rode a bus back to Hakone (forgot our day-backpack at a soft-icecream stand after getting on the bus.... we all piled off again, caught a bus back, got the bag, then continued to Hakone haha)

From Hakone-Yumoto we went to Matsumoto, then to Takayama, to Nagano, and finally to Kyoto.

Summary:
Hakone-Yumoto was a mountainous area where we stayed in a traditional japanese inn, toured around a big mountain via train, rope-way, gondola, pirate-ship, and bus.

Matsumoto was a launching point to see Takayama. Matsumoto travel took about 4hrs from Hakone-Yumoto

Takayama had an Edo style district with Edo (Edo period was Japan's isolation period from roughly 1610 to 1863, samurai etc.) style streets. The streets were good, but the bus ride was perilously fantastic. It went through mountains to get to Takayama and as such we went through tunnels that we found out were only about 2 buses wide, tremendously narrow roads insanely close to cliffs while riding in our "greyhound-sized" bus where naught but a small guard RAIL protected us from certain doom (the rail was bent out of shape in SO many places- at least it was fun to look over the edge?), rice fields etc.

Nagoya had an awesome Toyoto museum about Toyoto's humble beginnings and the company's journey to its current state as automobile plant. It started out as a textiles plant!

Then we went to Kyoto (35min by bullet train).

And thus started our second week!

We might be making some posts about each place in more detail in addition to the slideshow, but we're undecided ;)

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Similar Post: Miyajima: "What's that in the ocean??"

Completely Different Post: Day 5: Food poisoning and Rain!

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