That's a cool haircut!!

Paul, me, Gio, Danielle's B-day

Me and Paul, Kobe conference

Birthday's and Beer!!!

Well the last couple of weekends have been pretty busy. Danielle had her birthday on the 20th, and to celebrate we went out with some of our friends for dinner at a great Thai restaurant. After the meal a few of us decided to go to Sam & Daves (a club in town) to drink some more and party. Ended up being a really good night, I don't remember a lot towards the end, only dropping my Takoyaki all through the plastic bag on my way to the train station and then proceeding to eat it with my hands and trying not to burn myself.
On to this weekend just gone, Danielle decided to celebrate her birthday again by combining her's with Kevin's. They booked the Disco room at Aria Blu (the best Karaoke place in town) and invited heaps of people to come along. It's definitely the best value in town, all you can drink from 11.30pm till 5am, and complete with our own stage, disco ball and lights. There were probably around 20 people there, everyone had a great time dancing, singing and drinking far to much!! I think it was close to 7 when we got into bed, slept until around 2.30pm and then had to get up and get ready for soccer. Had a big hangover, but so did a lot of the other boys, we ended up winning the game 3-2. This weekend is the big soccer tournament on Awaji island so all the boys are pretty excited, there's a few boys who are leaving in August to go home so hopefully we can give them a good send off at the tournament. Danielle is coming as well, she is playing for the Osaka girls team, they are the defending champs so she might get to see some silverware. Also I've just applied for a new visa, so fingers crossed that things go alright, just give me one more year!!!!!

Hiroshima and Miyajima photo's

Hiroshima and Miyajima

We just had Golden week here in Japan, so everyone gets about 4 days off work. We thought this was the perfect opportunity to head away and see some sights. It also worked out well because we had Kylie and Tristan visiting from OZ!
We tried booking accommodation for Hiroshima about 4 weeks ago but we were out of luck as its the busiest time of the year. So anyway we got the bullet train at around 7am from Osaka, and it only took about 1hour 20mins to get to Hiroshima. We arrived and had breakfast and then headed straight for the Peace Park. The peace park was amazing, we spent a couple of hours looking around the museum and the park itself. It was the hottest day, so we enjoyed being out in the sun listening to the drummers and bands etc.
Once we had done the peace park we jumped on a train and headed for Miyajima. Miyajima is famous for its beauty and its wild deer, and it would be one of my favorite places so far. We spent the whole afternoon looking around Miyajima and taking awesome photo's of temples and things. We went on a gondola up the mountain to the top where there were amazing views over the ocean and the island, and from there you can walk up to the summit, its quite a long walk but definitely worth the trouble. I think it was around 7pm when we headed back for Hiroshima station, we got there and had dinner and just relaxed for an hour or so because we were so stuffed from all the walking during the day. Our train was just after 10pm from Hiroshima back to Osaka, so by the time we got to Osaka and then changed trains for home it was after 12. It was a awesome day of sunshine and sights.