The next morning, it was time to visit the park, which is a smaller recreation of all of Thailand, although it is not small in any way, it takes several hours to get around it in a golf cart:

Thailand likes reclining buddhas :)

you could walk the floating market and of course yummy drinks :)

It was a impressive and well built place, definitely worth at least 3 hours with a golf cart, and more if you can:

This time around, I went to Thailand for Unkonscious Festival, and it was mostly located around Pattaya, south/east of Bangkok, along the coast.

After spending the day visiting sights, and checking in the next hotel, arrived in time for the boat party by Pattaya:

After the boat party was over, had a bit of time to visit downtown Pattaya main street, and it was very seedy indeed (not posting everything I saw, haha):

There was a bit of time the next day in the morning to visit more sights:

And that was the end of the half sightseeing day, the rest of the time was spent at Unkonscious Festival.

Once the festival was over, had most of day to visit more local sights before going back to Bangkok:

Found a nice chinese temple on the way:

The local water market was fun enough and worth visiting on foot too:

There were several smaller aquariums, went to see one of them: Pattaya Underwaler World

Next was another nice park with a so-so crocodile show:

the gardens were quite nice, though

and it was then time to go towards Bangkok to check in our new hotel and go to the 5th Unkonscious Party. The [last 2 days were spent in Bangkok|]/perso/thailand/post_2024-02-04_Finishing-Unkonscious-Festival-with-2-Days-in-Bangkok.html].

met Arturo there to join us and drive to Niseko

food food as always

Arturo won wasabi roulette :)

Hokkaido and Niseko especially gets reliable snow, and it actually snowed every day we were thee, not huge amount like in tahoe, but enough that it was fun:

After 2 days in Annupuri, we moved to the main Niseko Village base and stayed at the wonderful Pension Island and with wonderful Kako-SAn:

she is adorable and took great care of us

The food trucks close to our Pension, were fun dinner options:

did I mention it snowed almost all the time? :)

we also did a sit down dinner at a somewhat expensie restaurant we actually had been to before

my own google maps review said it was overpriced and not that great last time we went, but we did enjoy it more this time around

After 8 days around Niseko, Rusutsu and ending in Kiroro, we drove to Chitose to be close to our plane back out the next day:

managed to use enough of my japanese to order food in a restaurant which spoke no english at all

last breakfast before heading out

We had great snow, here are the blog reports on snowboarding:

We had a great time, thanks to Arturo for making the trip happen.

On my way to Hokkaido for a snowboarding trip with Arturo, I had 24H in Tokyo:

bye SFO

hello Tokyo

Once in Haneda, I checked in my snowboard for my trip to Sapporo the next day, which was a bit of a hassle but saved me from carrying the bulky bag across Tokyo.

missed out on a cheap haircut :)

I decided to base myself in Shinjuku for that short time, because fun things:

Did a quick hop to Harajuku:

Harajuku is known for a special kind of fashion

After that, I went to a language exchange café to chat with locals:

And went out for dinner:

hahaha, can't argue with that

yum

The next morning, went back to Harajuku and Meiji Jingu:

Quick Cat café on the way :)

Quick stop by Shibuya crossing, because why not :)

also lunch :)

had to pick up a custom japanese toy to bring back

And then it was time to go back to Haneda for my flight to Hokkaido to go snowboarding