A Week Until Take Off...

Hey everyone! Tess here.

Today, March 1st,  is the first snow day MCLA has had all winter. Because of that, I finally have free time to start up my travel blog! Today marks the one week point before I leave Albany Airport for Tokyo. I'm still a little gob-smacked by the fact that at this time next week I will be on a 15 hour flight to Japan.

I am traveling with a small class of students at my school, including my housemate Eric, his girlfriend Kristen, my former library co-worker Bridgette and my super-special-awesome-roommate-and-friend Megan.It's honestly pretty comforting to be traveling with so many people I'm familiar with; I'd be really intimidated about traveling to some place so foreign without a friendly face to accompany me.  There are eight students total going on this trip, with four chaperones including our Professor, Dr. Kailai Huang.

To prepare for this course, we have learned some basic Japanese language and history. I need to practice my Japanese a little before the, but otherwise I feel like I'm in decent shape to go.We are going to see so many amazing things! I wish I had a full itinerary I could copy for you all, but I don't yet. I can, however, tell you some of the things we'll be doing!

- We'll be spending a total of four days in Tokyo.

- Our hotel (The Sakura Hotel) will be in in Ikebukuro. I'm particularly excited about this for nerdy reasons, as Ikebukuro is the setting for Durarara, a series of light novels and Anime I love. The anime was meticulous in portraying Ikebukuro in complete accuracy, so we will be able to see the real life places that these animated settings were drawn from!

- Two full days of our stay in Tokyo will be complete free time, in which we will be able to wander and explore the area as we see fit! I am particularly excited for these days. I plan to dedicated a certain amount of my spending money on trying different foods, including sushi, udon noodles, ramen from a stand, food from a hibachi grill... all sorts of things! Megan are also planning on visiting a hot spring spa one day, which promises to be awesome and surprisingly inexpensive. It's going to be an amazing few days of shopping for souvenirs, eating Japanese food and generally exploring the huge metropolis of Tokyo.

-  For the first time ever, Dr. Huang has successful gotten us in for a tour of the Kyoto Imperial Palace. This is the Palace of the ancient capitol, where the imperial family used to live many centuries ago. We will also be getting a look at the Tokyo Imperial Palace, the (slightly) more modern dwelling of Japan's emperor.

- We will be spending one night in a traditional Japanese Inn, which will include sleeping on futons, and being treated to two large traditional Japanese meals, for which we will be given Kimono to wear.

- We will be visiting the Hiroshima A-Bomb Dome; a place designed to memorialize the peoples who's lives were lost in the destruction when the American forces dropped Atomic Bombs on the cities of  Hiroshima and Nagasaki during WWII.

- We will be visiting the Kyoto Manga Museum, which is sure to be a blast! It is a museum celebrated and containing over 250,000 different series of Japanese graphic novels, or Manga.

- We will be visiting a huge variety of temples and shrines, both Buddhist and Shinto. The shires we will be visiting include: Kiyomizu Temple, Temple of Golden Pavilion, Miyajima Itsukushima shrine, and many more.

- We will also be visiting over site-seeing places, such as Okayama Garden and Castle, Kurashiki Bikan, and "The Neon City" Shinjuku.

I am so excited for this trip. It's blowing my mind that I'm actually going in a week. I'm going to spread this blog around to my friends and family, so that when the time comes you can follow what I am doing, as well as see all the pictures and experiences I will be posting about.In the mean time, give me suggestions! What do you think I should do in Japan? Any food I should sample, or place I should try and go? Want me to pick you up a specific souvenir? Follow this blog and tell me about it!

Bye for now! I'll keep posting later. =)

- Tess Lucey