Hamamatsu Castle Park - Sakura!

Konnichiwa! I have been in Japan for a little over a week now. I'm in my apartment now, but I have a few posts to do to catch up.

Last Saturday my boyfriend and I left at 8:20 a.m. eastern time, had about a 3 hour layover in Atlanta and then flew to Narita and arrived a little before 4 p.m. Sunday Japan time (3 a.m. Sunday eastern time). I kind of dozed off for a couple minutes here and there on the plane, but never really completely fell asleep. Once we landed we had to go through immigration, send our bags to the hotel, and exchange money. Then we had to take a 45 minute train to Tokyo, and then take the shinkansen for an hour and a half to Hamamatsu. It was about 9:30 when we arrived in Hamamatsu, which was 8:30 a.m. back home so we had been traveling over 24 hours. We were super tired!

Training started on Tuesday, so we had a free day on Monday. I'm glad we arrived a day early because I was pretty jet lagged! I felt it more this time than last time for some reason.

I went to bed pretty soon after arriving at the hotel, but I did take the time to take a couple pictures. This was the view from my room:

On Monday we wandered around Hamamatsu a bit, went to a few stores including Uniqlo where we were amused by some of the men's clothing such as pink capri pants and pink toe socks.

We ate ramen for lunch. This was Hokkaido style ramen which had a miso base and lots of stuff in it including pork, chicken, bean sprouts, corn, green onions, peppers, and bamboo.

I saw a lot of signs for Jubilo, Iwata's soccer team, around Hamamatsu. Iwata is where I'm living.

I didn't see any sakura drinks or food at Starbucks this year (I saw it online weeks ago so I guess they were already done), but Mister Donut had plenty of sakura stuff!

I bought some panda Pocky (chocolate sticks with white cookies and cream icing) and acerola tea. Acerola is a type of fruit and I didn't think it was very good. I should have gone with the apple tea, which I love, but I wanted to try something different.

After shopping for a little bit we headed to Hamamatsu Castle Park. It was super pretty!