sinnatious

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?



CONSIDER THIS TICKED OFF THE BUCKET LIST.

( Mostly just photos of flower and bonsais 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! )








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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 )

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 )

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! )

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 )

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! )

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 )