Japan

For Spring break of '04 we went to Tokyo, Japan. We had always wanted to go here after taking Japanese in high school (and college for Jeff). What we found out was that after 3-5 years of learning the language we knew absolutely nothing. And no one spoke English. But we were on a mission here. We were on the hunt for PEZ! You see, we collect them and they only sell certain ones in each country and Japan had cool mini pez that came out of machines. And once we found them we couldn't just buy a couple, we needed one of each kind and of course they didn't always come out that way. We ended up with lots of the same ones but eventually we got all of them.

One day we went to the Imperial Palace and walked around the gardens. The cherry blossoms were in full bloom and they were gorgeous. Another day we went to see Mt. Fuji and during the bus ride we could see the mountain beautifully but when we got closer it was so cloudy we couldn't see it anymore so we didn't get a single picture. We walked around most of the day and stopped at a noodle shop for lunch. Japan wasn't nearly as crowded as Hong Kong and the weather was perfect.
We didn't eat any authentic Japanese food (other than the noodle shop) mainly because none of the menus were in English and we were afraid we'd get sushi or some other type of seafood. We did find a great Mexican restaurant and we ate there twice!