Minneapolis - Edmonton - Calgary: April 19-20


The first leg of our journey was to the flat countryside of Edmonton, Canada. It was not exactly on the way to Calgary from Minneapolis, but it was the cheapest path to get to Tokyo. We flew to Calgary on the smallest plane I've ever been on, a propeller plane. Calgary itself is a pretty nice place. It has a bustling downtown, I bought a jumbo donair from Big John's Puzza and Donair. John wasn't as big as I thought he would be. 




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Third day in Tokyo: April 24

Image
 On this third day I had planned to go see Mt. Fuji, but it's been overcast and rainy every single day of our stay in Tokyo, so there's a good chance we wouldn't even be able to see it from the neighborhood I wanted to visit. This was only the first disappointment of the day, I don't want to give the impression that I'm having a bad time here, some things just didn't work out on this day, I'll explain later.     So, skipping Mt. Fuji gave us a lot of extra time so we went to some places my dad was interested in. We checked out the Tokyo National Diet Building, which sounds like an odd name, but it's called that because it's where the Japanese parliament meets. Diet is the Prussian term for parliament, and Japan adopted the term during the Meiji restoration, which was a period when Japan had just reopened it's borders and made a great effort to take in ideas from other countries leading in their fields and use them to improve Japanese society. Pru
Read more

Second full day in Tokyo: April 23

Image
 On our second full day in Tokyo we started our day by making our way to Ueno park, which holds the Tokyo National Museum as well as Ueno Zoo. My plan was to eat omurice (a breakfast dish that consists of a plate of rice with a slightly liquidy omelet sat on top that is cut in the center so that the omelet drapes over the rice) but all of the restaurants nearby that serve omurice were not open yet, so we went to a 7-11 for an easy konbini meal. By the time we were done eating the Tokyo National Museum was about to open so we walked to Ueno park and explored the exhibits. The outside was beautiful, but we weren't allowed to take pictures inside.     It was a very interesting experience inside the museum, I can't believe how many ancient artifacts there were that were thousands of years old or more. The special exhibit that was in this rotation was about Honen, a Buddhist master who brought the concept of Pure Land Buddhism to Japan. One aspect of this revolution of Buddhism I li
Read more