I am having more and more fun making YouTube videos. They are still rudimentary, but I am getting the hang of the intricacies of Finalcut Pro (an old-fashioned great program from Apple) and YouTube. For daily videos, you also have to keep it simple. A video like this can easily take an hour to edit, and that’s a bit too long.
Yesterday, I shared the following video on YouTube about our day in Kyoto. I was quite satisfied with the timelapse of climbing the hill at the Fushimi Inari temple complex.
I have recently started using a GoPro Hero to shoot snap videos, that is, quick shots without the explicit intention of producing visually appealing images. I edit the footage with Finalcut Pro.
Now, I am capturing our trip through Japan with it and posting it on YouTube.
In a beautiful location along the banks of the Daiya, an old man has a fantastic little restaurant where you can drink excellent macha and eat the local specialty Yuba.
Today, we travel to Nikko. The name Nikko still makes me think of toy cars, but I am just learning that Nikko Toys of toy cars is a Hong Kong company.
We take the subway to Kita-Senju. It is still unclear to us whether we can buy separate train tickets for the Limited Express to Nikko or whether we should have made reservations in advance. The Japanese train network has several operators, a bit like in the Netherlands. Only in Japan do all those train companies have their own systems of tickets and seat reservations. Those systems are all pretty unfathomable until you’ve used them once. You only understand it when you see it, so to speak. Also, different companies have different ticket offices; in some places, they even have different buildings (like in Nikko, where JR East’s ticket office is 200 meters away from Tobu’s). May we be happy with our public transport card. On the other hand, Japanese trains do always run, and on time, too.
In the end, when we leave the station in Nikko, it turns out that we did something wrong after all (technical story) and kind of moonlighted.
We leave the station and look up against the mountains of snow. We are at 550 meters altitude here, says a sign. We leave our luggage at the tattered hotel with a gruff young Japanese man who barely speaks, let alone in English. The amenities in the hotel room are corny, but the decor is great Japanese, and the view of the village with the snow-capped mountains in the background makes up for everything.
Booking hotels is Japan is not hard. Booking.com helps. And Jalan.net. And Google.
Watch out for love hotels, though. These are just among the list of innocuous Ryokans and Western hotels. Fortunately, they are usually easy to spot by their un-Japanese opulent furnishings. Sometimes, it is stated that a room is for adults only. Most reliable, however, are the reviews. A love hotel has no reviews. At a real hotel, Stephan, Juanita, and Kees leave their real-life comments.
