Ken@Japan

You can refer back to the previous articles: ・ Day1 Good Morning, Amsterdam! I didn’t remember when I fell asleep in a hostel. Upon a long flight with some nervousness in a place unknown to me, I was tired to have a deep sleep. I woke up at 2 am in the middle of night, realizing I was a bit sweaty so I took a shower. Well, the water was too cold and didn’t come out of the shower head enough. Like a stream in woods, I needed to scoop up the water with hands. I managed to wash my fair and body somehow but I felt a bit cold, so I went directly back to my bed to get myself warm. I fell asleep without noticing again and regained consciousness at 7 am.  Day 2 began with breakfast search: I should have bought groceries to cook breakfast in the kitchen last night…. Anyways, I put my valuables with my Nikcon D750 SRL inherited by my late father into my daily bag and walked into the downtown of Amsterdam. Into a breakfast journey April 27 was Sunday, so the city wasn’t that busy in the morni...

The cheapest flight from Japan to Europe is via China in most cases. I flied with C hina Eastern Airline  from Osaka to Pudong Airport and then to Amsterdam. The transit time was just for 1.5 hours at Pudong so I had to rush to the transit process: the arrival dock was a bit far from the transit reception where all of the international transit passengers should pass the passport control and security check. I'm usually carrying a backpack with me without baggage check-in, in which the whole belongings are packed for the entire trip, so I'm a bit nervous for passing my bag into the X-ray to be checked by insepctors anytime. Well,  if they find mines suspicious, I have to open it and show the whole packed items to them: simply, it would be wasting time. This time: all clear, nothing happened. First encounter I'd bought an e-sim for my mobile networking in the Netherlands, so I turned on my smartphone and checked the Google map to map out the route I would take to my hostel whe...

Japan has a holiday season from the end of April to the beginning in May, which we call “the Golden Week”. During the week, I often travel overseas except for a few years under the COVID 19. This year, I went to the Netherlands.   You may ask why the Netherlands? I always chose a place to go based on the facts; ・ I’m yet to visit ・ financially reasonable air tickets are available; and ・ the place shall be physically distant from Japan (so that I can enjoy the long vacation)   In most cases, I prefer Europe to other areas because I majored in European history for the bachelor degree at my university and I’m interested in arts coming from the medieval Europe. In this context, the Netherlands is a place hitting my heart this time.   To me, the Netherlands is a place of “Huis Ten Bosch”, a theme park for experiencing Dutch cultures, based in Nagasaki, Kyushu. Lending to it, Japan and the Netherlands have been in a good relationship since 1600s AD. At the time, the Shogun at T...