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 :)