Mt. Fuji from Saitama

As promised... this is a photo from my student apartment in Saitama, from the 6th floor looking over Hakone Way at Mt. Fuji Towering above EVERYTHING in site! Amazing... I asked her if I could move in... she laughed nervously... hehe (I hope she knows I was only joking!!!)

I hope that when I travel to different places in the world, I will find things that I love just as much as I love Mt. Fuji!!! I really think it is my favourite thing to look at - I always get a warm homely feel and I can't stop smiling when I am looking at it! Strange maybe, but it is just such an incredible natural creation! I am definitely apprecaiting both man made beauty and natural beauty being so near Tokyo and so near to Mt. Fuji! Gotta love Japan!!!

Sunshine City, Ikebukuro

It was Fran's first time to go to a building this high... in Japan... well... ever!!! I was really excited about going up there, there is a very special feeling being up there... like a buzz, where you feel you are literally on top of the world!!! If I could live on the 60th floor of Sunshine City I would!!! We could see so much further than when I had gone up there by myself in October, and the mountains to the west of Tokyo looked HUMONGOUS behind the cityscape! I was super excited as the sun was setting.  We decided that we would walk around the building one more time, before sitting and watching the sunset behind Mt. Fuji. The picture below, you can just make out Tokyo Bay on the horizon!

I can honestly say that I wasn't prepared for how amazing this sunset was actually going to be... and it is by far the most spectacular, incredible, mindblowing thing I have seen in my time here in Japan. Gunna leave it to the photos... so here goes...

Clematis no oka, Shizuoka.

This was the furthest I've been outside of Tokyo, and I learnt a really important "living in Tokyo" lessons:

 NEVER EVER try to meet ANYONE in Tokyo JR train station!!! Or any other big train station in Tokyo for that matter! They are too big and have so many different entrances and exits within entrances and exits withing entrances and exits! It's just silly!

 I got to Tokyo station at 8:45am and finally me and Ayumi found each other at 9:55am! When we found each other though the day went pretty smoothly! We took the Shinkansen (my first Shinkansen trip... once I got over the fact that I felt like I was in an airplane that never took off I really enjoyed it!) to a place called Mishima in the Shizuoka Prefecture. When we set off in the morning it was really overcast looking a bit dull but by the time we had got there the sun was out and it looked like it was going to be a beautiful day - I was hoping to see Mt. Fuji on our trip there but all the clouds were really low so we couldn't see too much of anything! We took a free shuttle bus from the Station to Garden which took about 30mins which flew by - Me and Ayumi have lots of things in common so we didn't run out of things to talk about! When we got there we were both amazed by the views, a perfectly relaxing garden with silhouettes of the mountains in the background. I was a bit scared to start with because as soon as we walked through the entrance I saw one of those ridiculously huge hornets again! I guess I was a lot calmer than if I had been on my own, my initial reaction probably would have been to "run as quickly as you can in the opposite direction!" but he wasn't bothered by us he was happy going in and out of the flowers. So I guess I can say (as I didn't get stung!) that it was cool to see the hornet a bit closer up!

So in Clematis no oka there are 2 separate places with a free shuttle bus to drive you between the two, one is a beautiful serene garden with lots of flowers, statues and art and the second is nature reserve park with a big rope-way bridge! We decided to walk around the garden first.

We actually walked around the garden pretty fast it maybe took us 20mins but we chilled out for 10mins on this beautiful bench! This place was like a cute secret garden, it was circular and had about 8 of these benches around the circle with beautiful white flowers surrounding you. It was amazing!

 The main reason we went here was so I could take photos of Ayumi to build up my photography portfolio. So we decided to take our time and go around the garden again, and this time actually appreciate every little bit that the garden had to offer. I will add a few pictures from the shoot with Ayumi through this blog post.

There was an art/statue museum that you had to walk through to get the lower ground floor of the garden (there is a photo above!) and both times I put my hand on the railing as I went to walk down the stairs, just as I was about to walk down the stairs and both times I got an electric shock of the metal! I was so annoyed the first time... you can't even imagine how annoyed I was the second time! hehe, I felt like one of those monkeys they train to do things ... see if they learn not to do something if they get a electric shock each time! All I can say is I'm glad we didn't go round 3 times, I would have been super super angry with myself if I had gotten 3 electric shocks!

Also, the first time we had gone around we had tried to get out of this door... totally ignoring the exit signs! Turns out this isn't a door at all you a fancy looking window! Man we felt so stupid!!!

 We were totally confused when we saw people disappearing into the ground, we had to go check it out or ourselves, there was just a walk way down under the statue and there were more statues underneath - nothing too exciting but disappearing into the ground was exciting enough to keep us entertained - haha!

... there were so many flowers...

 After walking around the garden for the second time we decided to head to the other places in Clematis no oka. We didn't know what to expect so we were surprised when we got there are in the was like a big woodland with lots of greenery and bamboo but no flowers. We decided to stop and admire the rope-way bridge and have something to eat. Ayumi had a roll that had curry in it! So funny Japanese food! It still surprises me :-) We only had an hour left to spend here so we rushed alot and only saw about a tenth of the place which was a shame. It was very beautiful, I wish we had gone there in autumn when the leaves are red and yellow! I just wanna say one thing... I went on the rope-way bridge! oh yeah! It's true!

See! Look! There's proof I went on the bridge... I was actually more scared of the massive spiders hanging from their big spider webs above my head than I was about being on the really high and rickety moving bridge!!!

We were both exhausted from our long day out and were looking forward to sleeping the train home, we didn't take the shinkansen back to Tokyo because it was too expensive to do twice in 1 day! So we knew we had like 110mins on 1 train! Plenty of time to snooze! When we were on the bus going back to Mishima Train Station we were talking about Japanese (she was teaching me a few sentences) and looking at the scenery which had totally clouded over! I was saying what a shame it was that we had come all this way yet still hadn't seen Mt. Fuji... then for some reason I looked behind me and I saw this...

... sorry about the awful photo! We were moving and on the bus! I was so excited and Ayumi said, no no, that's not Mt. Fuji, it's not big enough! I was so confused, I was like... not big enough... it's huge! haha. When we got off the train Ayumi decided asked a lady standing at the bus stop if it was Fuji and she said it was and told Ayumi that it looks small because we are far away from it... and of course if we were closer it would look alot bigger. haha, bless her! I thought that was hilarious! So yay! I've seen Mt. Fuji... a silhouette of only the top but still I can say I've seen it now!! So here's Mt. Fuji 富士山 with the lady in the lilac top that told us it was Mt. Fuji, what a nice lady!

 We had to wait a while at the train station for our train so we just chilled and chatting and relaxing. Then I saw a tiny bit of the sun was on show through the clouds and it was the brightest orange colour and the sunlight was so bright. The rest of the sun was behind the clouds still. As more and more of the sun began to show I walked to the end of the platform to take some photos... this was the most incredible sunset I have ever seen in my whole life... EVER! The colours were so vibrant I'm sure my photos can't do it justice, the sun was absolutely HUGE, I have never seen it even half as big as it was then!

This last photo kind of shows how big the sun looked, Ayumi is stood there in her white shirt taking a photo of the sunset! By this point everybody on the platform was stood there with their cameras out or their phones taking a photo of the incredible sunset!!!

All in all this was an amazing and perfect day, I got some great photos of Ayumi, I went on the Shinkansen for the first time, I really really enjoyed being outside of Tokyo, I loved the scenery, I got on so well with Ayumi and we had a proper laugh, took some awesome photos of flowers, went on a rope bridge, saw Mt Fuji, saw the most amazing sunset and... slept all the way home! Perfect day!!!!

Tama Zoo

We had an amazing day!!! Full of fun!!! I wanted to go to this zoo because I had heard good things about their butterfly house and I knew they had snow leopard there which neither me nor Fran had seen before! It took us about 1 and a half hours to get there from where we live. It is about an hour west of Tokyo in a place called Hino.

We had heard that there was also a lion enclosure and you could go on a "lion bus" and drive through, I was scared about going on it, but in the end my excitement took over! It was amazing being up that close to these incredible animals. Unfortunately, they were all chilling out relaxing they weren't doing anything particular but it was still a great experience!

This zoo was so different to any other zoo I have visited - the majority of the animals looked relatively happy to be there. This made me laugh, the giraffes, zebras and ostriches were sharing an enclosure! hehe! Do you think that this giraffe thinks he's a zebra?

All the kangaroos were chilling lying on the floor and some sleeping, the male kangaroos were sooooo much bigger than the females I had no idea of the size difference! This particular kangaroo was the only one up and about, she looked so uncomfortable and every time she was trying to find a position to relax in - she couldn't (with her baby in her pouch)! The baby kept poking his head out and she kept pushing it back in. It was quite amusing so watch :-) and so adorable!

Ok, so this was our first time to see a koala EVER!!!!! There was a HUGE crowd, they really didn't do much, just ate eucalyptus leaves but they were sooooo cute and it was really hard to stop watching them. Something about them was just so intriguing!

Haha, I wonder what face the monkey is pulling back to that kid!

The Red Panda's had an amazing enclosure, inside and outside, I have never seen these animals so lively, (I have only ever seen them eating slow or sleeping up a tree!) they were running around all over the place, this was the only picture I managed to get of them NOT moving around! They are gorgeous animals!

Ok, so I have ALOT of Tiger photos... (sorry about that) I was absolutely amazed by everything about the Tiger enclosure! They didn't have a cage, they had a hill covered in rocks, tree and stuff and then between us and them there was a river with some fencing so they couldn't jump the river, then a small wall for us to stand behind and that was that! Actually there was NO way the tigers were getting anywhere near us, but to have no plastic glass or fence in the middle of us was outstanding! It was so great, they were all running around playing. I was really surprised that the mum was sooooooo playful too! It was incredible to watch, I stood there for a loonnnnng time just watching! It was just great! My favourite thing of the day for sure!!!!!!!!

This was an adorable moment... all the other monkeys were making really really high and loud noises and this baby monkey went running into his mums arms, she was hugging him and rubbing his back whilst she was watching the other monkeys. The baby one was actually looking at her for about 10 seconds before she looked at him! I'm glad and so lucky to have captured this pretty awesome moment :-D

And... the butterflies... well you all know about my obsession with butterflies and how it has grown ALOT since I have been in Japan... I was in my element in the Butterfly house! I could have stayed there all day! Actually I want to go back when there are more of the other types of butterflies around. There were loads of butterflies but mainly all of the same type! The Tree Nymph one below actually landed on my bag!!!! I was so excited !!!! Wish someone had taken a photo of it! hehe!

Then to top the whole day off we saw Mt Fuji in the distance on our way home, It was really really exciting to see, and we are hoping to go on a day trip to Mt Fuji VERY SOON!!!!