Finally I am here again. Lots of themes in my head, lots of material around. All I can say it has been intense weeks laying behind me. In the meantime, a bunch of new followers joined me, certainly waiting for new inspiring input… Welcome here and thank you.
First of all, I showed you this nice Sake bottle https://visitingjapanesefriends.wordpress.com/2017/12/15/getting-prepared-for-japan/ and asserted that I will buy me some nice Sake drinking garnish. But it was not necessary, I am ashamed to say! Why? Because there was one already in one of our glass cabinets! We came to this garnish somewhere in Austria and it was a long time ago. I really forgot.
I got a lot more wonderful little objects from my dear friend Madoka directly from Japan, whereby the postage often makes up much more or more than the gift itself. Yes, the postage is horrendous, but this does not scare us off, we send each other little presents over decades! And I will decorate my future posts on this blog, one by one, with some of these wonderful culture miniatures from Japan.
But here for the start a very recent photo which Madoka sent me to invite me to a Sake in Japan, symbolically. It show the traditional specialities that are served in Japan at New Year’s time.
Madoka wrote: “We usually make or buy osechi for New Year’s Day in Japan…
Do you see Kanji 壽 in osechi ? It means Happiness. There are many boiled black beans with a little gilt. Gold makes us happy. Give it a try with Sake 酒🍶 !!”
You cannot believe, how excited I am! Japan, I am coming!
One of the reasons for my long absence here is Steemit, a blockchain-based international community where I started blogging in December. I withdrew my energies from most of my other former blogs but decided to keep blogging on this one.
This one is going to remain my special Japan blog, while my posts on Steemit are a mixture of all sorts of cultural stuff.
For Japan lovers and travelers the Social Medium Steemit is a good place to get the latest and hottest informations about Japan (and the rest of the world) and to get in touch with communicative Japanese people. Now I tell you how.
You just go to
http://steemit.com and klick on the tags #japan or #japanese – and here you go!
If you want to write and upvote yourself, however, you need to registrate and that takes some patience. You will find a bundle of helpful instructions on Steemit, especially in English. If you need help, feel free to ask.
I was lucky to meet Jürgen from the author duo “For 91 Days” during my very first days on Steemit. They have been living as digital nomads and travel authors for seven years and still go on. Their travel blog and their travel ebooks are really worth reading. I have two books already, one about Saigon, one about Tokyo. I wrote a Steemit article about the authors and their excellent travel book series:
From this page you can go to their other infos and ebooks.
So, finally…
Eager to be prepared for the great reunion in Japan after decades, I have been looking for videes about the Japanese way of living, traveling in Japan and Japanese culture in general.
To make the long story short, here are the two vlogs which I favorize at present:
English AND German Vlog:
English Vlog by an Englishman:
Abroad in Japan
Here another typical example:
He has a great number of abonnents and reports in a very dry and sarcastic style. Normally, I am no fan of sarcasm but he is doing so good in explaining and his contributions are really informative.
But look around… There are lots and lots of documentations and vlogs about Japan on YouTube – and probably on DTube (
https://d.tube/), too, very soon.
DTube is a new video community on the STEEM blockchain like Steemit.com, growing really fast. (Crypto investors, take attention!)
In my next blog, helpful media to learn and to communicate in
Japanese
will be my main theme, decorated with one other the other photo again.
From now, I will also post short informations (and links) concerning typical
Japanese traditions
like Ikebana, the Japanese tea ceremony, Kabuki, Origami and so forth (and will tag them).
So long and until next time!
Visiting Friends in Japan 