Spent two years of my life in a foreign land

My Japan portion (18 days) of the trip came to a close when I flew from Fukuoka to Hong Kong (via Shanghai) on Friday.  I figured I’d write a blog now to re-cap.

Japan was great! I really like the culture, the fashion, cleanliness and people in Japan.  The language barrier started to wear on me though, not so much for getting by but just not having a face to face conversation with anyone for days on end (Skype not included).  There is lots of good shopping in Japan but some of the prices are outrageous.  There was a Supreme store right by my hotel and I thought I’d go in a pick up a new 5 panel hat. Well when I exchanged the price with the help of an app I realized it was $80!

After a few days of easy running I did a session on Thursday and although it wasn’t as fast as I would normally have wanted to run 1200m repeats it wasn’t too far off.  And because it was four days after my 31km effort I think my legs are coming around just fine.  I have a track session tomorrow morning here in Hong Kong.  I picked my hotel to be close to a track and green space.  The track part worked out great (as long as I have access tomorrow morning as easily as I went in today) but the trails around here are on the side of a mountain.  I left the hotel this morning and headed to the forest but once I got there it went straight up.  Luckily there was a decent path along the waterfront for running.

Here’s a good pic of the track, my hotel and the steepness of the mountain.

My favourite snack in Japan was a dorayaki and I found the best place which made them fresh.  Usually a dorayaki is two pancakes with red bean paste in the middle, but these experts cook them with the paste in the middle (and have a second flavour of bean paste).

The banquet after the marathon was sweet.  Fresh steaks.

And some dragon fruit.

We went to an English Pub afterwards with a bunch of runners.

The Japanese runners thought I looked like someone famous and had me pose beside a picture.

There are these traditional temples all over the place, often right beside very modern buildings.

Christmas in Fukuoka.  There was even an ice skating rink in this park.