dvarin, oren, bk1e (and various other people) discussed it for a while, and eventually those three and I committed to going. We planned to go in June because of the Hyakumangoku Matsuri in Kanazawa, since Oren and Carl had been there for that in the summer of '99 when they studied there.
We bought our plane tickets in March 2001 for our June 2001 trip. Sometime around then I think everyone except me picked up copies of the Lonely Planet tourbook of Japan... Carl and Oren started figuring out all this stuff they wanted to do... Oren came up with a bunch of trip itineraries with the stuff he wanted to see (temples, castles, gardens, etc), and also got us all to get International Youth Hostelling memberships and made reservations at a whole lot of youth hostels (sometime in May he did that), and the ryokan in Kanazawa. We all ordered Japan Rail Passes sometime in early May as well. Personally, I didn't really do much planning beforehand except to make a list of which bands I wanted to shop for CDs of; I was just overjoyed to go to Japan at all.
Once we got to Japan we stuck to the city itinerary that Oren had planned out (since we had hostel/etc reservations), but things would happen like "yo, we're going to Okayama tonight. What do you guys want to do?" and I'd be like "DDR? Karaoke? Shopping?" and we ended up doing that, before seeing a garden in the morning or whatever. And in Tokyo we really winged it a lot because we hadn't planned on hating the youth hostel and on it taking an hour and a half to get ANYWHERE. But we did see Akihabara as planned, and the Tokyo Tower, and Brad and Oren both visited people, and I put in a request to go to the Hard Rock Cafe to get t-shirts, and... god, 3 days in Tokyo is not enough. 3 days in Kyoto isn't either. I NEED TO GO BACK.
I wrote a LONG travelogue about our trip, if you haven't seen it, it's at http://www.dr4b.org/japantrip/japantrip.html. I also put up some of my pictures at http://www.dr4b.org/japanscans, but if you want to come over sometime and see more pictures and my collection of postcards and tickets and other random things I picked up in Japan, I love showing that stuff off.
(sigh I want to go back want to go back want to go back.)
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
We bought our plane tickets in March 2001 for our June 2001 trip. Sometime around then I think everyone except me picked up copies of the Lonely Planet tourbook of Japan... Carl and Oren started figuring out all this stuff they wanted to do... Oren came up with a bunch of trip itineraries with the stuff he wanted to see (temples, castles, gardens, etc), and also got us all to get International Youth Hostelling memberships and made reservations at a whole lot of youth hostels (sometime in May he did that), and the ryokan in Kanazawa. We all ordered Japan Rail Passes sometime in early May as well. Personally, I didn't really do much planning beforehand except to make a list of which bands I wanted to shop for CDs of; I was just overjoyed to go to Japan at all.
Once we got to Japan we stuck to the city itinerary that Oren had planned out (since we had hostel/etc reservations), but things would happen like "yo, we're going to Okayama tonight. What do you guys want to do?" and I'd be like "DDR? Karaoke? Shopping?" and we ended up doing that, before seeing a garden in the morning or whatever. And in Tokyo we really winged it a lot because we hadn't planned on hating the youth hostel and on it taking an hour and a half to get ANYWHERE. But we did see Akihabara as planned, and the Tokyo Tower, and Brad and Oren both visited people, and I put in a request to go to the Hard Rock Cafe to get t-shirts, and... god, 3 days in Tokyo is not enough. 3 days in Kyoto isn't either. I NEED TO GO BACK.
I wrote a LONG travelogue about our trip, if you haven't seen it, it's at http://www.dr4b.org/japantrip/japantrip.html. I also put up some of my pictures at http://www.dr4b.org/japanscans, but if you want to come over sometime and see more pictures and my collection of postcards and tickets and other random things I picked up in Japan, I love showing that stuff off.
(sigh I want to go back want to go back want to go back.)
no subject
no subject