midterm vacation

Every year from June to August, flocks of Taiwanese swarm to Furano for the lavender flower season, when fields and fields of lavender flowers flows in the breeze like waves and waves in a purple ocean. During our naka-yasumi (midterm break), I along with my high school friend from Harvard decided to take the trip to Furano because we believe seeing is believing :)

All the hotel booking and trip planning is done through a website called jalan: www.jalan.net. Strongly recommended! It navigates you through your research and helps you find the bottom price quickly.

After the trip I have to say I am extremely impressed with Japanese public transportation. Hokkaido is overall an very rural island, and during the trip we travelled through some of the most rural areas in Japan. Still, the train runs through them quite frequently and the commute to cities takes at most an hour. All the stations have guidebooks translated into several languages and sometimes tourguides that speak several languages. Japanese really do everything for your convenience.


The lavenders is said to bloom the best from mid-July to early August. We were a little worried that our trip would be too early for the blooming season. However thanks to the abundant rain this year (said to be the most in the past 50 years), it invited an early blooming season. The flowers reveals an astonishingly pure purple that the camera could hardly capture.


On the way to Furano, we stopped by Asahikawa Zoo--the nationally famous zoo for its polar animals. Here we are, enjoying our time with the dear, the polar bears and the seal :)

Mount Hakodate

Long time no see :) Again I gave in to my terrible habit of procrastination...So much has happened that my pen could barely follow.
Every little adventure I have taken here has something amazing, but none of them impressed me as much as Mount Hakodate. I knew it the moment I stepped out of the woods, soaked in sweat (not because of the intensity of the hiking but my own lack of exercise:P), after 40 minutes of hiking among dense vegetations. Like a scroll unfolding itself, the following scenery presented itself to me:
Well, due to my poor photography skill, the picture can barely do justice to the actual astonishing beauty of the place, but even the best photographer with a first class camera could not be able to capture the moment--the ocean that hid itself shyly behind the mountains, the breeze that caressed my face, the fresh smell of grass and soil blended with slight saltiness, the line that separated the ocean and the sky that every now and then was clouded and blurred by the fog that mystically rose from the water. What a feast to the eyes!
I would very much love to recite some famous lines from Japanese poetry to express the intensity of my feeling, and maybe another ten years of learning the language would allow me to do so, but at the moment all I could think of was the classic sentence struture we learned from JSL Level 1:
海も山も見えて、とても綺麗なところですねえ！
（Both the ocean and the mountain are visible in sight, this is such a beautiful place!）

The picture below was taken the second time I visited the mountain. The day was a lot lighter and the fog was not as heavy. The mountain top gives you a good view of the whole Hakodate city, which turned out to be a lot bigger than I thought.


The time between the dusk and the twilight everyday is known as the "magic hour". The following picture was taken at the magic hour--even without dramatic sunset glow, the serene and somewhat solemn view also mesmerized me with its magic. If you were with me at the moment, I believe you would feel it, too.