ahhh sorry such a late reply, but yes, i'm back in aussieland!
lol what happened was one of us got detected for swine flu in japan, i actually sat next to him on the plane lol. but anyway we all got put in quarantine for an unknown amount of days at the time, doses of tamiflu for everyone! The place we stayed at was great, they had a gym, tennis court massive space, games rooms and a hotel like feeling. All these government funded places don't even get used, it was just us and these african people using this language centre. And the people were really really nice, they all bought us presents and japanese toys to keep us busy and cause they all felt sorry for us. we all hired laptops and could hire dvds etc so i could keep facebook contact! anyway, we stayed managed to get out of quarantine slightly early cause the person who had swine flu had already been in quarantine for 6-7 days. anyway, we went to the hiroshima peace park, where one of the atomic bombs were dropped during the WWII. Truly a moving museum, we really couldn't stay for too long cause we were all trying to get to tokyo by the end of the day. So we all went on the bullet train/shinkansen to tokyo. Tokyo was absolutely insane! I loved it though, 1000's of people running through tokyo station with like 30 different platforms. Trains run exactly on time and at peak time they come every 30 seconds. Although, nightmare trying to get 19 westerners and their suitcases through all these people onto our trains to our hotels!
Anyway, we chose some traditional japanese hotel in tokyo, that meaning a japanese breakfast for us. i dunno about you, but it can be pretty hard trying to eat traditional japanese food. we managed to live though! most of us were really good at adapting to eating rice and w/e we could find that looked remotely edible. So we all organised a day in tokyo running around on the extremely large and busy rail system to see and experience everything we could since we missed a large part of our trip. ooh yeah our homestays got cancelled too, cause they school was worried about any sort of flu. and cause we just came from our flu season, wasn't such a good thing for them. anyway, we went to the massive electronic town with all the massive TV screens and lights all on buildings. Oh OH! We also went to Tokyo Disneyland for a day, dunno about you but theme parks in australia don't really compare to disneyland. Most of us hadn't been to disneyland before, also i've never really been a theme park person, but i loved it! ooh we went to the base of mt. fuji also, but it was too foggy and cloudy to see "her" at all. we had an argument to whether mt fuji was a male or female, but w/e. My teachers say you can only see mt fuji for like 100 days in the year. i guess we didn't go on a good day. But it was really interesting to see all the things they do to try and prevent it from errupting, cause mt fuji is a volcano. erm, its supposed to errupt every like 130 years and its been longer than that since it last errupted. They're letting the sulfuric gas leak out through tubes and pipes to try and stablelise the pressure or something like that, all i know is it smelt like sulfur
Well if Fuji did erupt, im sure at least 1/4 of Tokyo would be gone...
Anyway, i guess i shouldn't write too much. I've been kinda busy lately, sorry i haven't been keeping in contact with y'all very much. In the end it was a hella troublesome and wonky trip but i wish i could do it all again some day! and how dare you see transformers 2 without me, i still haven't seen it lol!
