Having been in northern Africa four months earlier I guess I wasn’t expecting to return there so soon after especially when based in Japan! However, just a few months after my once-in-a-lifetime trip to Tunisia I was planning a short trip to Seville in Spain, and the possibility of taking a little side quest to Morocco was too good an opportunity to turn down.
I had been on my way to Algeciras in Southern Spain before I met an Australian couple who said that I could Continue reading
The subject of zoos is one that can be extremely divisive at times. Many are critical of them for turning animals into a sideshow rather than being free to live their lives naturally in the wild. Putting animals in cages takes away the dignity according to some but there is of course a reason zoos exist. That is because they are popular and do give people the chance to see and learn about the animals. I can see it from both points of view and very much sit on the fence when it comes to deciding which camp I’m in!
Many Japanese zoos are managed by their local governments which means they are very affordable if not just down right cheap! However, the one which we went to at the start of the year cost 4-5 times more than that. It was somewhere I’d been aware of for a long time but was always Continue reading
The ever changing poses of Tokyo Fox!!
This third and final compilation of the year is a bumper edition featuring 12 matches (rather than the usual 10!) at a total of 10 different grounds in four prefectures including a few I’d never watched football at before.
A couple of these have had their own blog posts but the majority of them weren’t really considered to be worthy of a solitary post so I have collated them into this rankings list. As ever, it’s certainly not one to be taken too seriously as it’s based on a mixture of Continue reading
Of the 47 prefectures in Japan I have now been to 41 of them with the most recent new addition being Oita in the north-eastern part of Kyushu; Japan’s most southerly main island. I’m sure I’ll vist them all eventually but Oita was the one remaining prefecture I had something of a desire to visit and that was finally realised last year when I took a one-way flight there.
A flight being just 20 minutes late is not usually a problem but on this occasion it meant that I Continue reading
There are a great number of train fanatics in Japan who have a passion for all kinds of things whether it be stations, platforms, rails, signs, sounds, ekiben (regional lunchbox sets sold at stations) or just the trains themselves. As for train-shaped buildings, they are fairly limited in terms of quantity but certainly not appeal.
All three of these unique and impressive train-shaped buildings are located within 80 kilometres of each other. Two of them are in Continue reading
2024 was a bumper year for watching rugby by my standards as I attended twice as many matches as I’ve ever seen in any previous year.
More importantly, it now gives me the opportunity for my first ever top 10 compilation post for rugby matches but before we get into the rankings list let me give a little shout-out to Continue reading
The Tokyo locations rightly get all the acclaim and attention in ‘Lost In Translation‘ (2003) but it is often forgotten that Kyoto also features for a short time as Charlotte (Scarlett Johanson) visits a temple and a shrine on her little trip to the city.
Back in 2021 I finally visited the latter (Heian-jingu Shrine) to get some screenshot match-ups but I never realised till after that pit-stop in Kyoto that the temple featured was Continue reading
Think of train stations in Japan and the mighty Shinjuku station is sure to come to mind for many people. That is the world’s busiest train station, and Japan monopolises the top 50 list with only five of them not in this country. However, at the other end of the scale are some tiny stations which are usually unstaffed and used by very few commuters.
Station: Igaya
Prefecture: Continue reading
With a yellow beak like that I first thought this quirky station building in Japan was designed to look like a duck or maybe a penguin but it seems my powers of observation on this occasion were wide of the mark.
As the title of the post suggests, this building actually looks like one of the country’s most famous mythical folkloric creatures. Such bipedal, turtle-like aquatic goblins are known as Continue reading
For many British people, going on holiday to Spain is very much a common occurrence but my family just never went there when I was a kid, and I have still only visited the country once. That happened 15 years ago whilst I was back in the UK for the Christmas and New Year holidays, and decided to finally take a short trip to Spain. The islands of Ibiza, Majorca, and Tenerife are hugely popular as are cities like Barcelona and Madrid but I chose a slightly less tourist destination.
The fourth biggest city in Spain is Continue reading
Tokyo Fox (東京狐) 