sinnatious

So since I'm apparently still a woman of leisure, when a bunch of relatives from overseas came to visit, they realised that rather than spend a stupid amount of money on hiring a car, they could just rope me along to drive mine!

2014-06-12 17.08.53

Though this was more time with family than I typically like, it turned out to be a not-too-terrible deal. I netted a free trip to the Whitsunday Islands!

( It's pretty much paradise, also Australia Zoo )

Last travel post!

My path back to Australia took me via Japan, and given the time of year, why not stay a couple of extra days and see some cherry blossoms?

2014-04-12 10.50.39

CONSIDER THIS TICKED OFF THE BUCKET LIST.

( Mostly just photos of flower and bonsais under the cut )

There's only two of these travel posts left now!

Picking up where I left off last time, we caught the train from Montreal to New York, because we were cheapskates and it was like a quarter of the price of flying. It was actually a pretty comfy trip, about seven hours long, plus about forty minutes at the border for customs and immigration. There was only something like ten other passengers so it wasn't too bad, aside from about half an hour where the elderly chinese guy sang along to his headphones.

The scenery was quite nice for a lot of it though.

( Lots of photos of awesome famous places under the cut )

After my exceedingly pleasant stopover in Vancouver, my next stop was in Toronto!

I had a old University buddy living in Toronto who wanted in on my world trip and had planned holidays while I was in the vicinity accordingly. This was pretty cool because I netted a travel buddy, but it did somewhat play havoc with my itinerary (or lack of one). But whatever, free place to crash for a couple of days in Toronto!

Toronto was... underwhelming though, after so many of the other places I'd been on my trip. Some people have asked me what my favourite and least favourite places were, and while I would be hard pressed to pick a favourite, Toronto was easily my least-favourite stopover of the journey. I'm sorry Torontonians! It was still an interesting place in its own right, but it was kind of dreary. Maybe not helped by the weather or season. (Though this was true most places...)

Of course, in Toronto's defence it was around this time I started getting some serious travel fatigue. At this point I had been travelling for nearly five months, and living out of a suitcase transitioning between hotels and air beds was getting a little old.

Still, despite my increasing lack of curiosity, I did wander downtown a bit. Found this place:

I didn't actually go in here because I know nothing about ice hockey, since as you can imagine it is not a popular Australian sport. But still very Canadian.

( More pics under the cut! )

.

I hadn't actually really planned to go to Vancouver at all. But I needed out of San Francisco, and had secured accommodation with a friend later in the week, and was left with an awkward gap of a few days. So at the last minute I wound up booking a flight to Vancouver.

It was very disconcerting, on first arriving to Vancouver, to collect my bag from the baggage carousel at the airport, walk towards the exit... and wind up on the street.

I looked back. Had I somehow circumvented customs? Immigration? No, it just turned out that flying from San Francisco is basically a domestic flight, and the processing I'd gone through while passing security (without even noticing, because American airport security has so many steps I just assumed they were double-checking my identity) was all that was needed. It was such a stark contrast to my arrival in Quebec that I sort of stood there for a couple of minutes in confusion, worrying about visas, before shrugging and wandering off in search of a train station.

I really knew very little about Vancouver. People had told me it was nice, and not as cold as other parts of Canada, and it gets compared to Melbourne a bit, but that was all! Nothing about what one should see or do in Vancouver.

Turns out Vancouver is really awesome.

( My time there was much too short )

So! San Francisco is amazing.

I did not have nearly enough time in San Francisco to appreciate the city proper - I got to see only a small fraction of the things I wanted to see. I'd made the somewhat inconveniently-timed jaunt to the opposite side of the country in order to attend the Game Developer's Conference, and the subsequently astronomical hotel prices meant I really couldn't stay much beyond that. I managed to only really squeeze in one day of proper sightseeing.

( 10/10 would live here )

Onward once again with the travel posts!

I actually wound up going to Montreal twice because pretty much everything after Chicago itinerary-wise was totally messed up and all over the place for various reasons. A big part of that being that to get to and from Quebec City to anywhere else you really have to go through Montreal - I flew in direct from Chicago only because by a weird fluke that was the cheaper option at the time. So it was a very pleasant four hours on the train through the snowy landscape until I was once more dumped unceremoniously back out into -17 degree temperatures.

( Pics under the cut )

Rolling right along with the travel posts, we venture into colder territory - CANADA.

More specifically, Quebec City.

I had crossed seven borders at this point and been waved through without a care (even in Japan with my extended stay) until I got to Quebec City, which decided to do the whole interrogation and rifle-through-the-suitcase thing. There was no real concern because I knew I wasn't carrying anything remotely contraband, but jeeeez did it give me a helluva lousy first impression of Quebec. Luckily I had been playing some Papers, Please on my laptop in Chicago which has given me a whole new world of empathy for immigration agents.

In any case, I was staying with a friend in Quebec, and since I got in on a Friday night, bright and early Saturday morning we went to his favourite bakery.

There are bakeries all over Quebec City. Chocaltiers too, they are ridiculously prevalent. French patisseries, guys! The food was so so good. The best one out of this set was definitely the pear-thing, I have no idea of what its actual name was. My friend speaks reasonably fluent French so for the vast majority of transactions I was content to sit back and let him speak and avoid outing us as filthy, filthy tourists.

( Lots of photos of cold things under the cut )

Another travel post! And so soon, too! I have a lot of catching up to do.

( Chicago is basically Gotham City, okay )

This is rapidly feeling like ancient history, but here's another travel post! Expect a flurry of these over the next two weeks as I try to catch up. How has everybody been? Well, I hope?

So after Seoul, I made my way to the USA. I actually landed in Dallas Fort Worth and had a layover there, but wound up so jetlagged I didn't do anything, and also public transport in the United States outside of of the biggest urban centres is a horrible, horrible culture shock after asia's train system where you just turn up and there's a train magically there leading to walking distance of anywhere you might want to go. I did want to hit up the stockyards in Fort Worth but when the train timetable was 'oh hey it only comes once every two hours and even then you're gonna have to catch a cab' I promptly threw that idea in the bin and went back to sleep.

As a result, no Texas for me! It was onwards to Lake Charles, Louisiana.

( Pictures under the cut! )

Falling even further behind with these travel posts, gah! How is everyone? Well I hope?

I was only in Seoul for a couple of days, and lost pretty much an entire day to a fairly miserable stomach bug which was a giant tragedy. :( Especially since because of said stomach bug I didn't get the full South Korean food experience, as pretty much everything I tried tended towards the spicy and I was naturally ultra leery of spicy stuff because that burns coming back up. One thing I did notice about South Korea though which I didn't expect is how much they appear to love fried chicken. I swear every time I turned around there was another fried chicken place, KFC there must be all like 'AHHHH MOTHERLAND!'. I did venture to try some on my last day once my stomach was feeling a little more steady and have to say, no wonder, South Korea is pretty freaking good at fried chicken, it's like some undiscovered local speciality next to kimchi and bibimbap.

Anyhow, complaining about health issues is no fun and no one wants to read that. That time was mostly spent trying to stay hydrated in the hotel and watching Korean dramas which I didn't understand (and Ocean's Twelve and Cloud Atlas, the latter of which was only marginally more comprehensible than the dramas). As for the rest of it, that time was awesome!

( Photos under the cut! )

This is lagging fairly dramatically, but Hong Kong happened! And that was pretty cool.

I absolutely lucked out on my hotel room in Hong Kong. The hotel itself wasn't the greatest, but who cares, right? I would just sit at the window and stare. I admit to spending at least a couple of hours in Hong Kong just watching the boats come and go in the harbour, or the hawks riding the thermals as they wheeled above the water.

( more HK under the cut )

One last post about Japan! (Although not the last travel post. You're stuck with those for a bit longer yet!)

So, one of the highlights of my time in Kansai turned out to be Toei Eigamura aka Toei Movie Park.

Look, yet more Detective Conan VS Lupin the III promotions!

( Toei Eigamura, Nijo Castle, Arashiyama, Dotonbori and more )

Okay! I'm on my last few days in Japan, but my sleeping schedule is all messed up so here's another travel post!

I noticed my hotel (and a lot of other places too) often place bottles of water near all of the entrances to the building. Asking around about it, it appears to be an attempt to scare off stray cats. ...I cannot imagine how, but there you go, there's something kind of interesting, bit of an old wives' tale maybe? (Or a tiger rock...)

( Festivals, Kyoto, Kobe, Nara, oh my! )

So continues Sin's somewhat belated tales of overseas ~~mis~~adventures!

Huehuehue. There hasn't been that much Engrish actually but there are still some great ones to be found.
( Ridiculous amounts of photospam under the cut )

Yosh! Time to finish off the tales of my time in Kanto! Wow I'm already so far behind, this is stuff from last year already. I would apologise for the photo spam, but it would be lying.

Although the exact timeline of what I got up to has already blurred in my head, one interesting journey I made was to Jimbocho!

( Comiket, New Year's Eve, and a bunch of other random things around Tokyo )

It has been a while! A lot has happened since the last Japan post.

One standout was meeting up again with

dokuganria and heading to the Capcom Bar!

( Capcom Bar, Enoshima, Kamakura, Nikko, more Tokyo, Christmas! )

And so continues the merry chronicle of Sin's adventures!

The weather was completely pants today so I wound up spending the majority of it inside away from the cold miserable sleet/rain and catching up on internet and generally watching a lot of fairly bad Japanese TV. This has had the weird side effect of tricking me into watching a lot of Detective Conan since it appears to be featuring heavily in reruns at the moment, and it is a singularly frustrating show. I mean, I know it's a kid's show, but it bothers me that Conan's go-to trick is to knock someone unconscious and impersonate their voice and no one ever notices that hey, that person is actually sleeping and not even moving their lips or anything. It's exactly like that whole 'how the hell does Lois Lane not notice Clark Kent is Superman' thing.

Also it has the weird thing going on where it's so incredibly aimed at kids, yet there's this weirdly dark and adult angle to the premise where hey, Conan is actually an adult shrunk down to kid size because of attempted murder via experimental poison. And the show is full of murders and dead bodies everywhere. I kind of wish I was a kid again so I could fully enjoy it actually, it reminds me of all those glorious 80s/early 90s cartoons that dealt with strangely adult subject matter in hilariously unbelievable ways.

It's also had the strange side effect of hooking me on Magic Kaitou, and seriously, Detective Conan is the spin-off that got it cancelled? Kaitou Kid warrants his whole own series! I am irrationally upset that Kaitou has been reduced to an (albeit awesome) supporting character in Conan. Which means that yeah, I have maybe spent most of today reading Detective Conan and Magic Kaitou fanfiction and lamenting the fact that I'm in a foreign country getting sucked into a weird love/hate relationship with yet another Shonen Jump fandom.

...What was I talking about? Oh, right, Japan!

( Lots of photos under the cut )

My travels continue! I've barely stopped over the past three weeks, I have to slow down or I'm going to burn out at this rate, ha.

I had very few preconceptions about Taiwan and so it was an interesting stop in my journey! If I thought I stuck out in Singapore, that compared nothing to Taiwan! I think I saw maybe only two other non-Asians in all of Taipei. I was like 'where are all of my fellow tourists at?!' But it turns out all of my fellow tourists were Singaporean and Japanese going by my eavesdropping. There were thankfully some English signs at the major stations and very rarely around some of the tourist hotspots, but that was all.

With this in mind, I opened google maps and chose the most interesting looking thing within walking distance of Taipei Main Station.

And soon arrived at this incredibly long wall.
( Lots more photos under the cut )

So after much prevaricating, I have actually begun my world travels! I use 'world' in a very loose sense, in that I am actually not visiting that many places - simply 'more than one'. And now I'm going to use the power of the internet to inflict stories of my travels on everyone. Well, that, and use this journal as something of my personal travelogue. Considering I have already managed to lose my hat (not a metaphor for sanity, an actual physical hat), this is definitely one of those cases where things really need to be backed up on the net.

So, Singapore! My first stop on my tour. I flew Etihad for this leg because it was inexplicably the cheapest, and I say inexplicably because damn, not only was all the food and drink both frequent and free but each seat had in front of it a personal entertainment unit loaded up with games, tv shows, and heaps and heaps of movies (right up until the most recent DVD releases like Pacific Rim and Iron Man 3) and even came with power points so you could charge your various devices. I didn't want to leave the plane, guys. The plane had everything I needed.

( Photos and stories under the cut )

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August 2020

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Entries tagged with adventures

I LIED, HERE'S ANOTHER TRAVEL POST

Japan, once more

New York, New York!

Toronto! (And Montreal again)

Vancouver!

San Francisco!

Montreal Part 1!

Quebec City!

Chicago!

Louisiana and New Orleans

Seoul!

Hong Kong!

Kansai Part 3, 2014

Adventures in Kansai 2014 Part 2!

Kakegawa and Kansai 2014

Japan 2013 Part 3 - the rest of Kanto!

Japan 2013 Part 2

Japan 2013 Part 1

Taiwan!

Singapore and Merlions