Our fifth day in Japan was a busy one - we did our first full-day tour, which had six stops, including Nijo Castle, Kinkakuji Temple (also known as the Golden Pavilion), Kyoto Imperial Palace, Todai-ji temple, Deer Park, and the Kasuga Taisha Shinto Shrine. Many pictures were taken, and there’s a video showing several of the sites as well.

On a photographic note, I converted a few more of the photos in this set to a high-contrast black and white…I like the way they look, but I’m still trying to hone my own type of B&W look for post-processing.

(I’m writing this sitting on the floor of the Vancouver airport…back in Canada! Almost home…so sleepy.)

Guess who got inked in Okinawa? Check out the pictures (with a video)…

Day four in Japan had us doing our first tour - we spent the afternoon at several historical spots in Kyoto. The temples and shrines are beautiful! We celebrated Jason’s birthday by going out for some delicious food…Chinese food! Pictures published in the fourth Japan gallery (sadly they had to be down-sized a bunch before uploading…the Internet access here on Okinawa at the Zanpamisaki Royal Hotel is really slow).

Our third day in Japan had us waking up in Tokyo, and checking out of the very lavish Prince Sakura hotel to start our walking tour of Tokyo with my friend Andrew Shuttleworth. We saw a variety of places around the city of Tokyo, and by the end of the day we had the blisters to show for it! Warning: many of these pictures are of technology, which some of you may find boring - but I was in geek heaven. Check out the photo gallery…(comments have been enabled on the day three gallery, as an experiment, so if you’d like to comment on the photos, please feel free).

Our day two Japan photos are up, this time chronicling our journeys from Kyoto to Yokohama to Tokyo. We spent the afternoon in Yokohama - initially we were going to head for a place called Sea Paradise, but when we got to the station the cab driver told us it would cost 10,000 yen to get there - $100 CAD and an hour’s worth of our time. Both factors were steep, so we decided we’d skip that and spend the afternoon around Landmark Tower, the tallest building in Japan.

We’re keeping so busy that I haven’t had much time to edit photos…and my Dell XPS M1330 is starting to make louder and louder whining noises - in a quiet room, it’s really noticeable and really irritating. <sigh> Time to call Dell when I return to Canada…

Our first full day in Japan was focused on one thing: SUMO! We had tickets (thanks James!) to the second-last day of the sumo tournament being held in Osaka. Off we went! I took a great deal of photos, and heavily culled them all, but it was difficult to not have a rather sizable collection of sumo photos (no pun intended) remain. I only kept the best though, so hopefully they capture some of the action that we saw!

These are our “day zero” photos, which was our travel and arrival day…although technically we lost a day and a half with the 15 hour time zone change and the 14 hours of travelling (including the layover in Vancouver) so this is more like day zero/one. Not a lot here in the way of interesting photos, but I share them with you nonetheless.

That’s what we spent several hours watching yesterday - it was quite the spectacle! I have several hundred photos to process from yesterday (that’s culled down from over 900 photos), but I wanted to share a bit of what we’ve experienced thus far…

He tests the bandwidth at the place where he’s staying of course! Check this out…

17 mbps downstream? Wow - that’s fast. At home in Calgary I’m on a 10 mbps connection and it’s really more like 9 mbps. The upstream speed isn’t that impressive though - I have a solid 1 mbps at home - so this is probably DSL. Unfortunately, as fast as it is, the router seems to not like my laptop, I keep having to unplug it to get an IP address.

[OK, this post is mostly a joke, this is certainly not the first thing I did when we got here, but I haven't had time to write about our adventures thus far...hopefully today on the train I'll have a good two hours to process my photos and write.]

Tomorrow, I’m off to Japan for two weeks for a real, business-free vacation with Ashley. It’s going to be awesome! I tend not to get excited about vacations until right before they happen, so I’m just starting to get excited. I’m all geeked up, bringing:

• …the XPS M1330 laptop for photo and video processing (gotta’ have some grunt for processing those raw files)
• …the Fujitsu P7010D for watching movies on
• …my Proporta battery for keeping the Fujitsu lasting that 11 hour flight
• …the Nikon D300 + four lenses (including my new ultra-sharp 24-70 f/2.8) + 32 GB CF card + 3 x 8 GB CF cards
• …the Canon SD 850 IS (with 8 GB microSD) for snapping casual pics and for videos (damn I wish it did HD videos - I don’t want to bring my Canon HV20)
• …two Zunes 8’s (one for the wife, one for me)
• …one pair of Ultimate Ears super.fi 5 EB’s
• …a TomTom GPS (without maps, just for finding our way back to our starting point GPS coordinates - was going to bring the HP iPAQ GPS, but it crashed and that didn’t make me feel very confident)
• …iGo Juice with several adaptors, PPC Techs Lil Sync Cable, Lil Sync Mobile USB Power Pack for charging everything
• My T-Mobile Dash, not to use as a phone, but to look up our travel schedule
• …a few assorted adaptors and cables

Quick, I don’t leave until tomorrow AM - did I miss anything?