So, it has been awfully quiet the past weeks hasn’t it? The reason is very simple: Vincent was visiting! So no time for blogging, but all the more time for sightseeing, partying and discussing every woman walking by in that beautiful secret language called Dutch!

The day V arrived, he was exhausted. Assuming he would be, I hadn’t planned anything special for that day, so we just went to an izakaya to eat dinner and drink a bit on his safe arrival. While eating and talking, the drinking a bit, turned into drinking quite a lot and after leaving the izakaya nice and drunk, we decided it was time to get more f#cked up and headed for a pub. Along the way, we bumped into some random Japanese people, so we joined them, until they ran off to catch their last trains. We left shortly after that and returned back to my guesthouse to play some Naruto on my Nintendo Wii! We played until about 4 in the morning, which we totally regretted when we woke up the next day, but still, it was very fun!

That day, Monday, I took Vincent to yoyogi park, where we chilled a bit and slowly got rid of our hangovers. After hanging out at the park, we went shopping a bit in Harajuku. Since Vincent really wanted a Billionaire Boys Club t-shirt, I took him to the store, where he bought one, that turned out to be slightly too small. But still, nice incentive to loose some weight, huh!? (OOOOOWwww)

That evening, I had a training session planned in the “open dojo”  with Tosh and Mariko. I took along Vincent and Ramiro (a Dutch guy living in the same guesthouse). It was very fun to show some of the roppokai aikijujutsu moves to V and Ramiro. For me it was even more fun to see how someone who isn’t trained in aikido or aikijujutsu reacts to the move. While they don’t flip like we do, the moves do work, and totally got them off balance. Especially Ramiro’s reactions were fun to see, total surprise every time he somehow ended up either on the floor, or totally off balance. Check my move btw!

The next day, it was time for our first true trip. Tosh took us by car to Mount Fuji! Revered by all Japanese, this mountain was on my to-do list for a long time, but I just hadn’t come around to visiting it yet. We left around 9 in the morning (would’ve been 8, but Tosh ran into heavy traffic…) for the three hour drive to Fujisan, as it is called in Japanese.

When we got there after a 3 hours drive,  we couldn’t see a thing… Somehow, it was very cloudy that day, and the ENTIRE freakin mountain was covered in clouds, hiding every last part of it from view. Tosh was very disappointed and impressed at the same time, “how can something so big just disappear!?”

However, when we drove up to the halfway point, fuji gogome, we were able to catch a glimpse of the peak. We walked around gogome a bit, venturing a small way up the mountain, where we quickly discovered snow! So of course, boys will be boys, soon a snowball fight was in full effect.

After the fight, we walked around some more, before we decided to head back down the mountain to check out one of the lakes surrounding it, Lake Motosu-ko. Tosh took us to the actual spot where the Fujisan picture found on 1000 yen bills was taken. So that was quite fun to walk around and see for ourselves. We headed down to the lake, and enjoyed the view and silence for a while, before returning back to the hustle and bustle of the city.

On Wednesday I had to pick up my passport at the Chinese Embassy, since I applied for a Visa for my week’s stay in Beijing (I got it!). The Embassy is in Roppongi, so since we were there anyway, we decided to visit Roppongi Hills. This area has been designed as a work/living area for busy people. Large buildings, and modern statues fill the landscape here. The best is the 54 stories high building, which provides you with an excellent view of Tokyo!

After Roppongi Hills, we started preparing for our rail trip to Hiroshima, Osaka and Kyoto. We got our rail passes at Shinjuku station and headed back home to start packing for the 7 days of travel. After packing we watched some video and went to sleep early.

Thursday was the day to go to Hiroshima. We had a 5 hour train ride ahead of us anyway, so we knew we wouldn’t be doing any serious sightseeing on the first day anyway.Instead, once we arrived and were checked into our hotel safe and sound, we quickly headed into town to find us some food and drinks. Unfortunately, since it was Thursday, and raining on top of that, going out in Hiroshima proved a bit of a challenge. So around 2 we returned back to our hotel to catch some sleep.

When we woke up, we headed out for our main reason for coming to Hiroshima, the A bomb dome. This dome is the one building near the center of the blast that remained afterward.  The remains of the building have been preserved throughout the years, and will be preserved forever. It is a very impressive reminder of the horrible events that took place on that day.

However, what really got to us were the images found in the memorial museum, near the dome. Seeing the images of the impact, reading the stories of burned children somehow managing to get home, only to die there in the arms of their parents, and looking at the images of the horribly burned victims, it really left it’s impact. I truly hope, no nation will ever be so stupid as to use a weapon as horrific as this one.

However, being the down to earth Dutch guys that we are, we couldn’t help but feel a little bit uncomfortable with the purely victimized role Japan portrays here. Of course, the bomb was horrible, but let’s not forget Japan wasn’t exactly known for it’s gentle tactics either. It was an all out war and all sides committed horrible acts in the process. It would’ve been nice to see some of that back at an exhibition like this as well. Nonetheless, it was a very impressive museum, which finally managed to truly shut us up for a while (which, by itself, is already quite a feat I must say).

After the atomic bomb memorial site, we went to see the Hiroshima castle. Obviously, the castle is a replica of the original. Inside is a museum, and surrounding it is a nice park, with all kinds of reminders of the event, like statues and foundations of former military buildings. Although still ok to look at, it’s obviously not as impressive as the A bomb dome and surroundings.

At night we tried to find a nice place to party again (it being Friday and all), but unfortunately because of the heavy rain, all Japanese people were being boring apparently. Every place we entered was next to empty, so we were walking around kind of lost and confused about the absence of any good party. However, suddenly we heard some very promising music coming from some basement we passed. We decided to check it out and walked straight into a small techno party!

Did I say small? I meant, tiny!  Some 8 people inside, most of them being the djs spinning the records. The records they were spinning were excellent, however, and the second dj truly kicked ass. So we spent quite a while there dancing and chatting a bit with the few people hanging out there. Oh, and, nice hiding of the wires…

Next up, Osaka! But that’s a story for a next post .

Let’s see, where was I with my adventures? Oh yeah, my date with Marcia! We met up in Shibuya to find a nice place to have lunch. Although we were supposed to meet at 1 o’ clock at Hachiko, Marcia ran into some public transportation problems, so I waited for her at starbucks, where she arrived about an hour late…

We quickly left starbucks to have lunch at a small Brazilian place Marcia had spotted riding the bus. However, remembering where she exactly spotted the bar proved to be quite a problem (go female sense of direction . So we ended up walking around for about 2 hours searching for the place, until we decided to have lunch in another place.

While walking around we, of course, spoke about lots of things. Her father was Japanese, so she is half Japanese, half Brazilian. She grew up in Brazil, but has been living and working in Japan for quite a while now. She also mentioned fairly quickly she has a boyfriend, so that made it crystal clear what kind of date this was . The afternoon was very pleasant and we spoke about a lot of stuff.

At the end of the afternoon we hugged goodbye and that was, as they say, that. So I’m sorry to disappoint you guys, no wicked Brazilian adventures (yet . We are keeping in touch though and went out again yesterday with some of her friends to check out the hanami (cherry blossom parties) at Asakusa. Stay tuned for that adventure…

The next day was a Sunday and, since I had heard about the wicked things going on at Yoyogi park on Sunday, Michel and I decided to go and check it out. Although we were there a little bit later than planned, we still got to see plenty of fun stuff. All of it started of course by a quick view of the cosplayers gathered at the bridge outside Harajuku station.

Unfortunately most of the cosplayers already left for other places, since we were a bit late, so we quickly continued on to the park to see if we could find the rock and roll dancers. Fortunately they were very hard to miss, as just past the Harajuku bridge the various “gangs” gather up to show off their moves to the world. Each group had their own colors of clothing, but everybody had the same rock and roll style in their outfits. Very fun to see .

But it is even better to see some of them in action of course!

After the rock n roll dancers it started to dawn on me that this place felt kind of like our yearly Queensday party, only smaller. We were walking around the place, watching various bands perform on the side of the streets. Street vendors selling their junk vintage items, food stands selling food; very nice this weekly mini festival! It almost felt like home .

When we continued on to the park we were first treated with a stunning view of the park from the walk bridge along the road.

Quickly followed by the stunning view of a dance class rehearsing next to the stairs we came down from. While that was plain funny, the Japanese hippies sitting around in drum circles, continuously playing their beats, were simply awesome!

The park itself was vast and very nice. A lot of people were walking around, couples were having dates, kids (and grandpa’s) were flying kites, people playing catch, you get the drift. However, it was still a bit dusty, since it wasn’t even spring then. I absolutely have to go and see this park again this week, now the sakura trees are in full bloom!

We stayed in the park for about an hour, studying and watching the people passing by. Then we decided it was about time to head on home. On our way home we got treated by two excellent people: Super ehm… Beerbelly man and Predator. providing us with the perfect closure of this amazing day at Yoyogi park.

I’ll definitely visit this marvelous place again!