When planning this week, I had intended on leaving the day after our long hike with a chill out day as I knew we’d be sore and immobile due to our old age of 35. Even if we wanted to go out and explore the island, Typhoon Marwar decided for us that it was not the day to do so.
I woke up randomly at 3:30am yesterday morning and wasn’t able to get back to sleep. When we first arrived, everything was overcast so you weren’t able to see the 3000ft tall Mt. Motchomudake in front of our minshuku. I looked out the window and saw that the clouds had gone and there were a bunch of stars out. This was probably the best opportunity to try taking a few pictures of the night sky. I still have a ton to learn about this style of photography but I think these turned out nicely without dedicated equipment besides a tripod.
Woke up yesterday morning with rain outside our window. It looks like most of southern Japan was going to get showers the next few days which made it perfect timing for us to leave for the next place. A few years ago, my friend Luke recommended a place called Yakushima Island for my next Japan trip as it’s a designated world heritage site due to having Japanese cedar forests with trees that are several thousand years old.
The last two days in Fukuoka have been largely unstructured just so we could ease into the time change and the long list of activities we have planned for the next few weeks. As a result, our sleep has been kind of all over the place but TODAY we have places to be and stuff to do. I knew that I wanted to bring Joanna to one of the two peace museums either in Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Being in Fukuoka we’re about an hour from either city. Selfishly, I made the executive decision to just go back to Hiroshima because I wanted to eat Hiroshima style okonomiyaki again.
Last summer, I decided to enroll myself in a online beginners Japanese course through the University of Minnesota. This was my 3rd attempt at learning because I’m a terrible self learner and I need the threat of public humiliation as a motivator for success. This is also how I managed to get through grad school for 3 years.
I only managed to get about 2 hours of sleep last night due to jet lag. Woke up still not believing that we’re in Japan, one of our favorite places in the world. I usually have nothing hard scheduled for the first day of a trip, we’ll stay close to where our hotel/airbnb/hostel is and wander around to find things to eat, take a nap, and then eat some more. Today was no exception 🙂
On November 8th, 2019 Joanna and I had our wedding. It was great, people had a good time, I was relieved the wedding planning was over. For those of you that have had to plan a wedding, I’m sure you can relate to the stress of it all.
I had originally left my Friday flexible so that I could get an activity done in the morning then head into the work in the afternoon and work through the evening to coincide with US work hours so that I didn’t have to take a vacation day as I hoard those like a squirrel preparing for winter.
The original plan for the team for this trip was to arrive on Saturday morning and leave to the airport on Thursday night after work. I extended my trip an extra 2 days to leave Saturday night. In order to do that, I had to get manager approval which was an easy sell because my flight was $1000 cheaper than the rest of the team.
I’ve been anticipating this trip to come to our Mumbai office for almost a year and now that I’m here, this entire week has been a blur.
