Strolling through city streets, turning a corner revealing a beautiful shrine complex, nestled in the neighbouring modern buildings never ceases to amaze me. It is such a stunning mix of new and old, and often times once you pass through the gate into the complex a sense of tranquility comes over you while the busy…

We spent the better part of our day at the Instant Ramen Museum, making our own instant ramen packet and custom cup noodle flavours and tried a Hokkaido specialty ramen in the tasting room. What a fun and engaging way to spent a day! Definitely checkout the museum if you’re ever in Osaka and if…

Our exploration of the Instant Ramen Museum continues. After creating our own packages of instant ramen from scratch in the Chicken Ramen Factory, we continue the fun in the Cup Noodles Factory. This is where you can create your own custom cup noodle flavours, starting with the soup base followed by whatever ingredients you’d like…

The day had finally come for us to experience an attraction we had booked months prior and had been looking forward to ever since. It seems to go by several names, The Momofuku Ando Instant Ramen Museum or The Cup Noodles Museum. Either way, it’s all the same, an amazing museum where you can learn…

The first couple legs of our trip were coming to an end. We had spent the previous two weeks exploring the Northern end of Japan which was all new to us. We’d never gone to much farther North than Nagoya on previous trips. We were about to leave our last ryokan of this trip. No…

Our reprieve at Central Kogen Station was very welcome and completely unexpected. Who knew we would find a warm area to sit and enjoy a couple hot drinks and instant ramen from vending machines? Not us! It was extremely lucky actually as we were getting quite hungry and needed a rest from the hiking and…

Yup, Zao Onsen, along with being a famous onsen resort town, is famous for it’s skiing. The infrastructure to support skiing is vast, and looks like a skiers paradise. To Nicole’s chagrin, who actually knew about the skiing when we selected Zao Onsen as a stop on this trip, we were too early for the…

Sendai was a bit of a sleeper hit on this trip. We didn’t have high expectations for Sendai, mainly because we didn’t have any at all. We were not sure what to expect. We did a little research before the trip, but we put it on the list mainly because it was a larger city…

We woke a little nervous early on this Saturday morning. We had one day left to take our day trip to Yamadera from Sendai. If we couldn’t make it out today we would miss our chance on this vacation. The previous day’s high winds had cancelled all the trains running between Sendai and Yamagata, the…

Part 1 of episode 14 left us struggling with a dilemma as we came across what appeared to be a grocery store on our way to Rinnō-ji Temple. We love checking out grocery stores wherever we travel, but we were running out of daylight and as it would turn out, made the wise decision to…