d&h : in Japan for 2 years

Thailand Highlights

For the Golden Week holidays, we went to Taiwan for a friend’s wedding and then to Thailand for some rest and relaxation.  Here are just some highlights of the trip.  Another post on Thai food to come later.

Monks at the Grand Palace after worshipping the Emerald Buddah

Golden Reclining Buddah

During our Thai cooking class

Elephant trek

Sunset on the beach in Koh Chang

Random Sakura

My office building is next to the Sumida River.  On a nice day, at lunch, I wandered around the river bank so check out the sakura next to the river.

My office building and sakura!

Street lined by sakura

Did you notice the two different sakura varieties?

Osaka Castle Sakura

Osaka castle during spring.

Black Eggs

In Hakone, the specialty in the area is the onsen tamago (温泉玉子).   You can get them at Owakudani.  You may think that this is somewhat similar to the chinese black eggs (or thousand year eggs), but it’s completely different.

The eggs are cooked in hot onsen and the sulfur from the onsen water react to the eggshell and blacken it.  The inside is a silky poached egg.  Another term would be “soft boiled egg” as which is not the typical half-boiled egg that’s served in ramen restaurants.

Be advised, not all onsen tamagos being sold are soft boiled.  I found that out the hard way when I accidentally purchased the hard boiled version.  After having tried the onsen tamago, I definitely would eat it again.

Hakone

Hakone is less than 100km from Tokyo.  I had a couple of free nights to use for Hyatt, so I cashed them in at the Hyatt Regency Hakone.  The hotel was fantastic.  Built-in onsen and a beautiful firepit.  Complementary drink time was excellent.  It was just like a nomihodai (飲み放題).

We stayed for two nights, and were already a little sick with a cold, so we took it very easy, and just relaxed all weekend.  Quite unexpectedly, it snowed about 10 or 12 cm, so we actually didn’t see anything, but we did enjoy our hotel even more.  We stayed on the first floor, the onsen was on the second floor!

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Yukata from the hotel

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I’m on the world’s busiest gondola, and there’s no one in it.

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The tour boats in Hakone are all pirate ships

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12cm of snow in 1 day looks like this

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Firepit

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Cable car in the snow