We have now reached Japan - the land where toilet seats are heated and the toilet can wash your ...behind, and where the fish in the supermarket are as fresh as they come.
Before arriving in Japan, we spent about a week in China. Unfortunately for us, the entire week was one big national holiday, so everywhere was packed with chinese tourists. Beijing was great and we would have liked to stay longer, but lucky for our wallet, we had a plane to Xian to catch. In Xian we saw the Terracotta Warriors, which was a great sight, although it was with my life at stake that the photographs of them were taken, because of the above mentioned number of chinese tourists that pushed like crazy.
It has been an odd experience to come from asian countries as Mongolia and China to Japan, which in some ways are very asian and in other ways so differing. There is the above mentioned toilet with warm seats and a butt-washing function, compared to the mongolian and chinese hole in the ground. Crossing the street as a pedestrian, the cars have to stop for you and not the other way around like in China (actually, I think most people might even have a drivers license here, unlike in Mongolia).
And the trains are as picked out of a futuristic movie compared to the transmongolian railway!
But in other ways, Japan is still very asian, especially the always smiling and overly polite people and of course the food culture.
And there`s always an old temple nearby.
Arriving in Kobe, we of course tasted the famous Kobe steak and afterwards headed for Hiroshima, where we saw the A-Bomb Dome and all the memorial places and museums there is. Then Nagasaki was next, and although the museums and memorial places here were just as fascinating to see, the city was not as charming as Hiroshima. We`re now in Kyoto, which is a fantastic city. It holds everything new and modern about Japan, but still manage to capture the old japanese style and culture. Luckily we set aside several days to stay here, but somehow there`s so much to see and do that we probably don`t have time to see and do it all. We`re definitely coming back.