I haven’t been and cannot vouch but I was reading a travel article about Mexico City and I really want to go to this bakery now
can you ditch the wedding?
we just got back from a three week trip to japan. i don’t have an instagram, so i thought it would be fun to post them here. my wife is the photographer of the family, so any beauty i managed to capture was purely accidental.
looking over the ones i uploaded, i feel like they lack the variety of what i actually saw. i want to counteract this feeling by uploading tens of more photos, but i don’t think that’s the solution to my problem. happy to provide context to any pictures.
a few thoughts about the trip:
this was our second time to japan. our first time was in march - april 2020, right before/during covid. the first time anywhere always has a special mystique. some of that mystique has rubbed away, especially now in a post-covid world and in japan in particular, which is having a tourist boom–we didn’t realize how lucky we were at the time to be in a pratically empty kyoto. that said, we still found what we were looking for and more.
i can speak much more japanese now than i did the first time. meeting people was probably my favorite part of the trip. i was bought plenty of drinks, gained a few nicknames (my favorite of which was brick-san because my new friends thought i looked really big and strong), and heard some touch stories. in ena, we met a woman who was out on bail for 30 days before she’d be going to jail for a few years. we drank all night with her man and her friend and heard stories about her daughter, her rap music career, and all sorts of crazy things. because i don’t have social media, me and all these people are nothing more than ships passing in the night, but it was really wonderful. i loved delighting the woman who ran a karaoke bar in tokyo after a half-decent rendition of a ymo song.
tokyo, osaka, and kyoto are all great if you’re in the right neighborhood, but we had more fun the further we got away from the city. we took lots of buses, boats, cars, and trains. i always love looking out the window when traveling, so this was a big plus for me. next time we go to japan, we might skip the cities altogether.
taking a big trip will always lead to a little bit of soul searching, and this was no exception. seeing the different possibilities of life makes me reflect on my own and how i want to live it.
i think i’ll write something bigger and better later on.
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I take my camera on every trip and even when I take a good picture here and there it never does it justice – some things about travel are hard to capture (maybe even impossible). Regardless I love reading stuff like this, traveling to Japan has been a dream for a long time and this just makes me want to do that even more.
May I ask what these are? (Don’t know how to quote pictures on here, sorry!)
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my wife always manages to do it–sometimes by focusing on the small things but also sometimes by taking in the whole picture. but she’s pretty skilled imo.
japan is amazing and definitely doable for all different types. for some reason it always felt impossible/only for the rich before we went for the first time. knowing the language definitely helps with certain things but common sense + patience will get you just as far.
that place is the 100-step garden/hyakudanen/百段園 on a place called awajishima. specifically it’s at a luxury resort called the yumebutai 夢舞台 designed by tadao ando, but it’s free an open to the public. the island itself is interesting because some of it is this fishing/flower farming village that’s home to a buddhist temple submerged in water that was also designed by ando, some of it is devoted to the luxury resort, but then a lot of it is home to like, naruto and dragon quest theme parks lol. the resort and village felt like two distinct worlds, and we wouldn’t have known there were theme parks elsewhere on the island had i not known about them beforehand.
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Headed to Tennessee to visit family. Will be spending time around Nashville and Gatlinburg. I’m mostly along for the ride with my wife’s family but we’ll have our own car to ditch here and there. Going to do a fair bit of hiking, going to Dollywood, and whatever the local relatives recommend.
I haven’t done any research into the area or been to Tennessee before so if anyone has any recommendations I’m all ears!
@DaveedNoo was hatch show print cool? Do you need to book a tour in advance?
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I thought Hatch was pretty cool! It was like an hour where they tell you the history and show you how its done and you get to make a little print. I even bought some block print making stuff when I got back home. You do have to get tickets in advance so i’d plan ahead if you’re interested. We did not do the whole country music tour but you can bundle them as they share a building and its probably pretty cool.
One of my posters I snagged
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How long are you going to be around Nashville / what do you like to do? I would recommend Game Galaxy in Smyrna as a certified Cool Arcade if you have at least 4-5 hours to kill on a given day.
We’ll be around Nashville until tomorrow. Then we’re going to be around Gatlinburg until Saturday. I doubt we’ll have 4-5 hrs to be away from the main group unless maybe if the elders poop out. I like videogames of course, guitars and music, shopping in used book and other media stores, various museum, nature and hiking. We’ll be in Dollywood Wednesday, and have a few hikes planned the rest of our time here. We had some local cuisine with live music in Franklin last night that was cool.
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Think I’m going to New Mexico for a few days for my birthday in August. Never really been to the southwest but have always wanted to go. Think we’re gonna hit Albuquerque, Sante Fe, and Roswell. Anyone have any recs down there? Nature, food, anything really!
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check out McKay’s! you will probably be overwhelmed for the amount of time you have, but 100% worth the visit. Third Man Records is cool if you like record shopping and you’re around.
It’s a little on the tourist-y side, but everyone I’ve taken has enjoyed going to The Parthenon and the surrounding park.
Hope you have a good time! I actually just got back from visiting friends around there this past weekend (I’m from the Memphis area).
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We wandered around that park and had a great time :)
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Oh yeah! Third Man Records has always been filed away in my mind as a cool place I’ll never have a chance to visit. Thanks for the reminder, I should check that out.
One of my relatives works for the parks department and arranged a tour of the Bicentennial Capitol Mall which was neat. Learned more about Tennessee history than I ever thought I would. Some of our hikes may be rained out so these are good alternative options. Thanks again for the input.
I’m from a small town in the North Texas sticks so even basic big city amenities that I wouldn’t normally have quick access to is worthy of mentioning.
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drive from santa fe to los alamos if you can. prepare to be slightly depressed by roswell—i went pre-pandemic and it’s a gamble on how it fared. if you have time to go further south, the white sands national park is something else. very beautiful.
new mexico is great! i’m in arizona and have more recs in that area so lmk if things change.
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I did my first airplane trip since 2019 that didn’t involve either work or a family emergency last week, a whirlwind Chicago long weekend to see a good friend who I suspect was low-key trying to convince my partner and I to move to Chicago (actually I don’t suspect it, I know it). We were only delayed by 1-24 hours on every single flight, which is always awesome! But it was good to see my friend in person after 4 long years, and I really love that he’s enjoying Chicago so much!
It was weird, since I was pretty much a twice a year traveller between 2010 and 2019, but I now can barely stand being in airports or on planes. So that kinda makes me think that my plan for a Japan trip in fall is probably a pipe dream, since it involves even longer flights and longer time spent in airports!
(As an aside, not sure what it would take to get me to move back to the US, now that I’m solidly on track for Canadian citizenship in the next year or so, but I know for sure now that it’s not Chicago, lol)
Chicago was… not bad! It’s a bigger, fancier city than Edmonton of course, and the architecture was top-notch, but it’s also… a bigger, fancier city than Edmonton, haha. But I saw a bunch of buildings I’ve wanted to see since I was a kid, like Merchandise Mart, which is every bit as amazing as I had been led to believe it is! And I ate a bunch of vegan Mexican food, which was nice because Edmonton has only lousy Mexican food. Overall 8/10, a solid trip.
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seems low
Also worth noting that every local I met while I was there considered it to be 11/10, SSS+ tier, 120% power.
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well that’s kind of annoying. Sounds like you were talking to transplants and/or rahm Emanuel. I was thinking 8.7-9.2 range
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It would have been higher if they had visited more of the tri-state area.
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after years of telling people pitchfork ratings were a regional parlance, i’m finally vindicated
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