Let’s have a look at what’s happened since June, shall we?

In July we checked out Kawagoe, a little town north of Tokyo. We began with a visit to an American-style diner that served great burgers. Unfortunately, these burgers made me miss two days of work. But they were delicious.

In the evening we went to the BayStars/Giants game at the Tokyo dome. This was actually our first baseball game in Japan, and our first exposure to the baseball “spirit” the fans show game in, game out.

Pictures from Kawagoe and the Giants game are online.

A couple weekends later we headed to Yokohama for one of the first fireworks displays of the season. In Japan, fireworks displays are held regularly throughout the summer, and lots of people come out to watch. Everyone brings a blanket or tarp and picnic food and beer. Many are dressed in the traditional yukata. The fireworks are great too, lasting about an hour. It was probably an ad for the summertime fireworks that Shux saw in late 2007 that led us to Yokohama for New Year’s Eve fireworks.

Pictures from the fireworks display are also online.

August came and went, and in September we took some time off work and headed west to check out western Honshu. We stopped by Osaka, Kyoto, Kobe, Himeji, Hiroshima and Miyajima island. Along the way we ate excellent food, saw tons of cool temples, old Japan in Kyoto, and more Japanese baseball. Great time.

Pictures from the trip are — you guessed it — online.

After that we’ve just been working and otherwise spending time exploring Tokyo and area. One Sunday we headed to Yoyogi Park to hang with the rockabillies. We met up with Yuki, Shux’s friend from long ago. We also caught the last regular season game the Yakult Swallows played, after which three guys retired in a teary ceremony.

We had plans to do paragliding close to Mount Fuji. The rain looked threatening, but we still started our trip early on to make it to the paragliding place on time for our flights. On the way, we received a call that, due to the heavy rain at the site, all flights were off. Our thirst for adventure was not to be thwarted, though, as we changed our plans to drive down the Izu Peninsula to Shimoda instead. It was a long drive, and after eating some of the freshest sushi ever we didn’t get much time to visit the town, but it turned out to be a fun trip nonetheless.

We also visited Mount Takao, not too far from Tokyo. The summit became very popular in the last year or so after it was mentioned in the Michelin guide for some reason. From the summit, which is easy to get to, we were treated with a nice vew of Mount Fuji:

When Shux’s coworker was in Tokyo for a business trip, we went to Hakone for a day. It was a long weekend, and a hugely popular destination for many Tokyoites. We spent lots of time waiting in line for the bus, for the train, for the cablecar, and just barely caught our train back into the city. It was all worth it, though, for some nice sunset views:

Since then we’ve been doing shopping, getting ready for Christmas in Canada. Can’t wait!

Then Godzilla sneaks off to New York to get married. Nobody knew. What a very very sneaky guy!