Nice Japanese girls

With a population of about 30 million, Tokyo is full of sub-cultures. You can see the sub-groups on the weekend at Harajuku and Yoyogi Park. The young gothics dress up like the girls in this photo. They have a freaky issue with damaged body parts. A lot of them wear bandages across their noses like the girl second to the left. We saw some with eye patches and one girl who painted an injured, bloody eye on herself. If you're a keen people watcher, Harajuku to you would be like a candy store to a kid.

Cherry snowflakes in season

We're in Japan during the one week (or week and a half) of the year when the cherry blossoms bloom. Blowing in the wind, the petals fall from the trees like pink snow flakes and form a snow bed of cherry flowers. We're in Nikko, a town just a couple of hours north of Tokyo. In two days, we walked for a total of 10 hours exploring the brightly painted shrines and woodlands. The Lonely Planet guide says this town can get extremely crowded, but we found spots where we felt like we were the only people in existence. Just the feeling we were looking for when getting away from the big smoke of Tokyo for a couple of days.

Welcome to Japan!!

We only flew 4 hours from Hanoi to Tokyo but we feel like we're in a totally different world. Where are the men urinating on the street? Where are the dead rats? Why isn't anyone offering Dean drugs? Why isn't anyone trying to sell us crap we don't want or need? Why aren't people pushing us over to get on a public bus? Simple answer: We're in Japan now where cleanliness is a virtue, impeccable presentation is a moral standard and politeness is probably taught to the Japanese in utero. Everything here is over-packaged in the name of aesthetics, our cleaner THANKED US for letting him clean our hotel room and the airport bus baggage handlers lined up and bowed to us as the bus departed!! We had gotten used to Vietnamese directness, pragmatics and "snooze or lose" mentality of daily survival. We're not sure how Vietnam and Japan can even be in the same continent when we feel like we've entered a parallel universe.

My Vietnam

WOW - What a chapter!!! Today is our last day in Vietnam after living here for nearly 3 months. So many more memories, tears, experiences and human connections added to our lives. The highlights: Watching two blind people support each other across 12 lanes of hectic Saigon traffic; A H'Mong hill tribe girl offering a buffalo in return for Lina marrying her brother; A child drawing a goatee on himself with black texta to be like Dean; Dean being told he has a son in Hanoi; Eating pho bo to cure our hangovers; Lina improving her Vietnamese language skills to a confident and advanced level; Meeting our World Vision sponsor child; Dean appearing in a Vietnamese newspaper article for the work he did re-building homes; and not least: all the volunteer work we've done (to name a few!). It has all been amazing.

World Vision visit

We flew from Hanoi to Vietnam's 4th biggest city, Danang. From there, we drove for 3 hours to a town called Tra Bong to visit our Vietnamese World Vision sponsor child. He looks exactly as he does in the World Vision photo and we recognised him straight away. It was great to meet him, his brother and mum. This is a photo of a preschool/kindergarten that was built in April 2007 and funded by World Vision. You can see that the front yard is still under construction. It's being made into a playground. You can just imagine how cute all the children were. They were so gorgeous! Two of them did solo singing performances and the whole class recited a poem about traffic lights for us. On her knees, Lina went around to greet all 33 of them and shook their tiny little hands. We can't wait to meet two of our World Vision kids in South America later this year.