blog Archives - Life with julia

Julia / May 10, 2020

Adventures in Asia: Tokyo, Japan

And now, we’re onto the last stretch of our week-long journey in Japan. On the morning of February 26th, we walked to the station early in the morning at 8 AM to board the shinkansen, which would take us to Tokyo in 3.5-hours. It was the first time any of us were taking the shinkansen, which is the Japanese bullet train. I’ve heard a lot about how great they are – the cleanliness, how on time they are, and mostly how fast they travel (320 km/hour). I was so excited to finally be on one. Our ticket from Kyoto to Tokyo was around $130 CAD from what I remember. They’re definitely not cheap, but it’s one of the main ways to get from one big city to another far city. The shinkansen was a great experience. I loved how on-time and how efficient everything was. If your ticket said that…

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Julia / April 30, 2020

Adventures in Asia: Kyoto, Japan

We took the train to Kyoto on the morning of February 24th. The trip, departing from Osaka, would only take 1 hour and cost us 440 yen (we had gotten a metro card for our week in Japan upon arriving in Osaka and so, each time, we just had to top it up). After we got there, we decided that we were going to see the sights in Kyoto that were a bit further away from the main downtown core; we wanted to get them all out of the way so we could stay closer to the city the following day. We checked into our Airbnb (the cutest place ever that even had beds and a tea set on a traditional tatami mat), dropped off our luggage, and then took the bus to our first, much-anticipated stop of the day: the Arashiyama Bamboo Forest. This place felt magical. It felt…

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Julia / April 29, 2020

Adventures in Asia: Osaka & Nara, Japan

Japan, like Cambodia, was another trip that I knew I was going to prioritize and end up doing during my exchange. I had wanted to go to Japan for years and now that I was finally physically “close” to it (or at least closer than a 14-hour plane ride from Toronto), I was going to make the trip happen. I was so committed to the idea of it that I made sure to pack warm clothes with me back in December – jeans, sweaters, and even my light winter coat. Luckily, I found an amazing group of people who also wanted to go and very early on, we committed to a Japan trip for our school’s reading week in February. Our itinerary was as follows: We were going to be in Japan from February 21st to February 29th. We would spend the first 3 days (Feb 21-Feb 23) in Osaka,…

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Julia / April 22, 2020

Adventures in Asia: Yangon, Myanmar

To this day, I still can’t believe that I had ever stepped foot anywhere in Myanmar. What a surreal experience that whole weekend was. My decision to book my flight to Myanmar was completely spontaneous (I booked it when I should have definitely been studying for my upcoming midterm). Again, I had been tracking flights for a while and suddenly, prices dropped. And so, I found two people to go with, and together, we committed to this seemingly wild idea of going to Myanmar for a weekend. Coming to Singapore, I actually had made a list of places that I wanted to visit while I was going to be in Southeast Asia. I guess you could have called it a priority list; I knew that I wasn’t going to have the time to see everything and so, I wanted to make sure I saw what I wanted to see.…

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Julia / April 1, 2020

Adventures in Asia: Bangkok (Part Two)

The last 2 days I had in Bangkok were equally as fun as the first two were. Seeing that we had seen most of the temples, the last 2 days were spent at markets, good food joints, and wandering around. There was, however, one temple that I hadn’t yet done yet, which was Wat Pho (also known as the Temple of the Reclining Buddha) and so, we did this first thing in the morning of the third day. This Buddha was 46 metres long and 15 metres tall, covered in gold leaf. I remember how shocked I was when I first saw it. It looked like it was so large that it was squeezed into the building, about to burst out of the temple’s four walls. I kept thinking, “Wow, I thought I had seen the biggest reclining Buddha I’d ever see in Penang.” For reference, that one was about…

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