After an amazing 10 days in Japan, our heads are still spinning from the bright lights, fast trains and general craziness of it all. We started in Tokyo, then hit the slopes in Nozawa Onsen and finished off with a cultural fix in Kyoto.

The food in Japan was amazing everywhere we went, from the cheap and cheerful Onigiri at train stations, to a big warming bowl of soba on the slopes, to the rowdy tavern atmosphere of an izakaya. There are so many places to eat and as you can see in our pictures, we ate our way around the country.

We were given a great introduction to the food culture at the start of our trip by attending two of Elizabeth Andoh’s cooking classes. Elizabeth is an amazing women with an intimate knowledge of Japanese culture and food. We purchased her cookbook so we will hopefully be preparing some tasty Japanese meals in the future.

Tokyo is a fascinating city. With a population of 20 million people, the city seems to go on forever. It is a great place to explore and people watch. Some of the highlights for us were watching the Harajuku girls on Sunday afternoon and visiting Akihabara with its mashup of crazy manga, technology stores and costumed girls promoting maid cafes. We would also recommend checking out a few of the less touristy areas such as Shimo-Kitazawa; Mark’s friend Chris introduced us to this area and took us to a fantastic izakaya (Japanese Pub/Tavern with food) called Izakaya-Ism. Izakaya-ism was full of people sitting around little tables set into the floor; we had delicious seared mackerel, among other tasty sharing dishes . Another area we liked was Naka-Meguro where we chilled out in a hip cafe/bar called Combine.

After 4 days in Tokyo we got onto one of Japan’s sensational and prompt high-speed Shinkansen trains and headed for Nagano. From Nagano we took another train and a bus (all also prompt and easy to navigate) to get to Nozawa Onsen. We had booked into a cozy little place called Pension Schnee to enjoy a few days skiing and man were we in for a treat. Nozawa Onsen is an amazing little village with lots of traditional houses and bath houses and we were lucky to arrive when it was being dumped on with snow. Our accommodation was at the foot of the slopes so we were able to get up in the morning and ski (well if you didn’t have to hire your skis) to the chair lift. This was by far the best skiing we have ever done. It was topped off by the great food, friendly people and a blissful soak in an onsen (Japanese hot spring bath) at the end of a long day of skiing.

Our final destination was Kyoto, which is a historical city with many gorgeous temples and shrines scattered throughout.  In Kyoto we encountered other reminders of Japan’s history, including Geisha, women in traditional dress and samurai sword shops. It is lovely to get lost in. We spent hours walking around Nishiki (the food market), Gion, Pontocho and other places. Pontocho is a narrow pedestrian street with many nice places to eat where you can often see Geisha dashing between restaurants. We found Kyoto a little harder to crack than Tokyo; it may have been nice to have a local to show us around and discover the pulse.

We became quite fond of Japanese beverages, mainly Shochu and Sake. Sake is made only from rice and the quality varies depending on the quality of the rice and water used. Shochu, however, can be made from a variety of ingredients including sweet potato, barley, sugar and buckwheat; each of these gives a different taste and aroma. I was particularly fond of  “chu-hi,” a shochu hi-ball with soda water and fresh citrus (grapefruit, lemon etc). Mark preferred the more peaty taste of sweet potato schochu (click here for a good intro). We also fell in love with yuzushu (ゆず酒), shochu flavoured with yuzu (an amazing Japanese citrus), and if we could get a tree here in Australia we would be making our own!!