Sam and I have been dreaming of travelling Touhoku region for a long time now. For anyone who doesn’t know, Touhoku is the part of Honshu, Japan’s largest, most central Island. It stretches north of Tokyo and encompasses the remaining parts of Northern and Eastern Japan that we had left to explore. Because of how rail passes work in this area, we knew we needed around a week to really explore, but due to work commitments and finances, we just haven’t had the opportunity. With my new job too, I also won’t have another chance to take a long break like this for possibly a year or even longer, so it was important for us to do this trip now. We are very lucky that this all worked out for us and we got to spend the best week in Touhoku, I. Some incredible places with the best company. It was everything we ever dreamed of and more!
So what did we actually do and where did we go? Our first stop was Fukushima city in Fukushima prefecture. This city is very close to our friend’s home, so it was lovely for her to show us around somewhere close to her heart. The city beautiful! We got to ride a shinkansen there, (I will maybe do a whole blog dedicated to the trains on this trip, just so I can talk about this stuff I love with others that love it without boring anyone who doesn’t want to read such things,) then we did some walking, saw the city from above, went to a shrine and had a little rest in a park by a beautiful fountain. We wanted to jump in but managed to control ourselves and just get out hands wet. It was really really hot that first day, so it took everything in us to control our urge to lay in the water and sleep there.
After the park we visited the photography museum. I did some writing there and some drawing as I got really inspired by a lot of the pieces. We also saw some stunning photos, met the photographer and also watched his videography project too. It was very relaxing and the project was of such a high quality. Getting out of the sun and into air conditioning also enhanced an already wonderful experience. In our final hours in Fukushima we did some shopping and went to a café. We enjoyed our drinks, got some really nice accessories each as a holiday treat and caught an evening bullet train to Sendai, the next city on our list, where we would meet another of our friends, who now lives there.
If you want to read about what we got up to next, please look out for Part 2 in the next few days. For now though, I’ll just drop some photos of Fukushima for you.
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