Bencito

This is the last album of my November 2006 trip to East Asia.

http://travel.webshots.com/album/560412857VPKhZy

I had a twelve hour layover at the Narita airport on my way back home. This turned out to be one of the top highlights of my East Asian journey! I visited the following sites and enjoyed them thoroughly:

· Narita San Temple, its huge gardens and the historic town site. The temple grounds are huge, nice and tranquil. The weather was cool, marking a huge contrast from Bangkok! I also saw the beautiful fall colours.
· Boso no Mura – a Japanese cultural village. Another great place to visit. There is a recreated historic main street with farm houses to get a taste of traditional Japan.

Thanks to the research I have done here and other sites to make this layover so enjoyable. This was my first time to see things in Japan and I hope to come back later on for more.

Ben

kuranosuke

ben, thanks for sharing your pics. your unagi don looked delicious.

btw, is it easy to use travel. webshots? i am looking for an easy to use photo site to post some of my travel pics.

Bencito

Hi Kuranosuke,

Thanks for your comment. Yes the Unagi Don was great and it cost me around $10 Canadian.

With regard to webshots, generally I find it very easy to use. I have used two other photo posting websites – worldisround and imagestation, and I find the basics of uploading and creating albums to be similar for these websites.

Generally speaking, I am very happy with webshots as it is easy to use and there are many nice features (like tagging, stats, friends and fans etc). However, there are restrictions as to how many photos you can post to your site. Some of my friends find the advertising annoying on webshots. I don’t see the advertising as I am a premium member (which costs $30 US per year and basic membership is free.) If you want to set the albums as private, I don’t think there are stats calculated on these albums

I have seen Fodorites use Pbase, Flickr and Kodak Gallery plus a few other photo hosting sites as well to post their photo travel reports, and they look great as well. I am not too familiar with those sites. From my experience, each photo hosting site offers some different features.

Hope this helps.

Please let me know if you would like more information on webshots.

Ben

KMLoke

imagestation has been closed down.

mrwunrfl

Thanks for the pix and report. It is good to see what a trip to Narita town is like. We have discussed it a good bit here. I would like to note that there are 35 photos there and the only one that ken commented on was the unagi don. Does look like a great lunch.

kuranosuke

lol. observant as usual. take the points?

emd

Yes, you gotta admit, the onagi don looks damn good. I am going to Tachibana for dinner tomorrow night. Will have a piece of toro for you, mrw.

Where did you get that onagi don? It is enought in itself to make me want to further explore Narita. All I saw in my one evening there was the shopping mall. And by the way, although there are no clothes, swimsutis, or shoes larger than a U.S. size extra small (ok, it's an exaggeration, but not too much of one) the food court in that mall has some pretty good food too.

kuranosuke

hey, don't forget to have a piece of toro for me too. .

emd

Oh ken, you of little faith. I was going to have the entire rest of my extensive fresh sushi and sashimi dinner for you, and I also plan to drink enough sake for both of us.

kuranosuke

bravo, and kampai!

Bencito

Hi there,

It seems like there is a lot of interest in the Unagi Don…which is great!

I had this meal at a restaurant at the main street leading to the temple – Omote-Sando. I just picked a restaurant there and there are quite a few restaurants serving Unagi Don in the area. The restaurant had a plastic menu you could choose the food from. In the restaurant, there were regular seats and also a traditional section for people to kneel at the table, which is quite interesting to me.

In addition, there are many little stores on the Omote-Sando street, which are great for browsing. They sell some very interesting souvenir items outside the temple.

Within the gardens, there is a calligraphy museum as well.

emd

Bencito, that sounds good.

Has anyone ever started a thread about their favorite food memories from Japan? Maybe we need one.

(and ken, the one bummer is that they don't serve chocolate covered macadamia nuts at Tachibana. If they did, I'd move in, or maybe live in my car in the parking lot.)