Get your fried silk worm here!

Nathan and I walked along a "dinner market" in Beijing. It was exactly like the street food I've seen featured on travel shows! Such a variety of bizarre foods westerners would never consider eating- silk worms, scorpions, snakes and sea horses!

Peking duck

Best meal so far in China!

Beijing Street Market

We walked along the famous food market in Beijing where you can find everything from sea horses to snakes to eat. Members of our tour group tried the silk worms and scorpions. I tried an arm of a starfish. Mid-chew a beggar signaled that we were eating it wrong. You're only supposed to eat the inside. I spat out the chewed up starfish and we gave the uneaten portion of the starfish to the beggar.

Whether the beggar was right or he was just tricking us so he could eat it, we don't know.

Olympic Bird's Nest

Forbidden City

Tiananmen Square

Great Wall of China

Built by 700,000 people, the 5,000+ km wall is LONG. We took a sky lift like ride to the top of the mountain where the wall was located. Walked for 3 hours on the wall, climbing and descending thousands of stairs. Exhausting, but amazing!

Golden Pavilion - Kyoto

Kyoto at night

An after dinner walk through Kyoto.

Sally the camel has no humps...

... because Sally is a horse! Thought I picked up tuna, but was told I was eating horse...

Conveyor belt sushi!

Kyoto temple

Japanese cemetary

Each tomb holds ashes for multiple family members.

Hiroshima

Photo: A-bomb Dome

Hard to believe the city was destroyed just 65 years ago. We spent a few hours at the Peace Museum and grounds. Some of the stories, photos and artifacts were disturbing, particularly those of children who suffered and died soon after.

One girl, who was diagnosed with leukemia, made hundreds of paper cranes as she hoped for a cure. She died, but the tradition of origami cranes continued. There were thousands of origami cranes on memorials and statues in the area.

Shower Toilet

At first we were somewhat afraid of the high tech toilets, but we eventually gave in to curiosity. After the toilet "prepared" the warm water rinse, I pushed the shower button. Can't say I necessarily enjoyed the feeling of warm water spraying up my !!!, but I guess I felt cleansed...

Ramen

Delicious!

Asakusa

Imperial palace

Tsujiki fish market

Photo from the fish market:

First stop: Tokyo

Tokyo was an excellent start to our trip. Although only here for 2.5 days, we already feel We are adjusting well to our new home. The language barrier has proven difficult at times, but everyone we meet is nice and try very hard to understand us.

Highlights:
- Tsujiki Fish Market: The largest wholesale seafood market in the world. An amazing place for its size, diversity of seafood and chaos. We were almost run over many times by carts carrying fish. The tuna were HUGE! Leaving Tsujiki, we were befriended by a local sushi chef who guided us to Ginza, a shopping district.

- Imperial Palace: Old Samurai guardhouses juxtaposed against the Tokyo skyline. The grounds are surrounded by moats and large castle walls.

- Asakusa: A large temple and many small shops. Makes us excited to see the temples of Kyoto. Got our fortunes. I got a "bad fortune" and hung it up to blow away in the wind. Jen got a "regular fortune."

- Lunch with relatives: it was great meeting with some of our Japanese relatives for lunch at a famous old Soba restaurant. The sake and food were excellent. As was of course the company.

- Shibuya: crazy intersection where hundreds of people line up waiting to cross. When the traffic lights turn red the mass crosses simultaneously.

New blog

Welcome to our new blog, created to chronicle ou big adventure! We hope you enjoy following along. We'll try to post when we can!