Since the first time I came to Japan, I’ve been making it a tradition to visit the temple Sensoji in Asakusa. This time I went by night, which was much much more comfortable than it was during the day as  a thousand tourists try to be in the same street, Nakamise, at the same time. I can’t help myself to go over to the Mikuji and get a random fortune. Unfortunately this time it predicted “bad luck” so I tied it to the lines so the ‘bad luck’ would stay there.

This year I went to Japan for the third time, to spend one and a half week in Tokyo. I wasn’t solely going for vacation this time, as half of the trip was to attend a conference. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to really travel around just like I did the previous two times, but I did make a day-trip to Nikko with a friend. Nikko is 125 km and a 2 hour train ride from Tokyo.

I went at the end of October, when the weather’s still really nice in Japan and we were hoping to see some nice autumn foliage but it seemed we were too early. We went to visit the temples and shrines first and then went up the mountain to see Lake Chuzenji, where it was unfortunately very cold. We only were able to see the Kegon waterfall and not the Ryuzu falls as we had planned due to limited time and there was some trouble with the busses and we weren’t sure we would be able to catch our last train otherwise.