Hokkaido After a sleepless night, I arrived in Hokkaido by ferry at 6 am.  I felt terrible and felt as if I would come down with a cold.  The first days on Hokkaido I spent with Akito and Mitsuo whom I had first met on the ferry to Sendai where they invited me to stay…

“Sorry Mama, I have to go, I must find a place to sleep and it looks like rain“. I was sitting in front of a 7/11 store, packed up my laptop, drank the rest of my cold coffee and carried on.  I found a little camp site under a bridge right next to a park. …

A Difficult Beginning Without a lot of preparation for my trip to Japan, and with no idea where I should stay overnight, I arrived in Osaka. After having spent nine months in both Australia and New Zealand, I was used to communicating with locals, to reading and understanding everything, to joking and to having meaningful…