Day 5: nagano-karuizawa

*back dated entry*

today officially marked the start of sightseeing part of our honeymoon trip = leave tokyo.... so for the first time, we get to take shinkansen!!!! & our first stop will be nagano.... i was quite excited about going to nagano since it's pretty up north = will be very cold & my lab mate said he saw the japan hour introduction of this place was so nice!!!! so we checked out of our hotel early in the morning & stepped into the shinkansen station for the first time!!!

shinkansen station

bentou shop

yummy sandwich

bentou

pretty bentou

shinkansen

platform to nagano

our train

inside shinkansen

we quite shuaku since we never took shinkansen before... the seats were much more spacious than we expect but since we had to put our luggage in front of us so there wasnt much leg space.... sadly there wasnt an area to put luggage....

on the way to nagano

japan landscape is really very different from what we had in asia, everything just looked so pretty & neat.... so after our 1.5hr ride, we reached nagano!!!

some mall in nagano

street along nagano

snow!!!!

hotel surrounding

hotel surrounding

pretty looking tree

chisun grand nagano hotel

for nagano i chose chisun grand hotel, it's abit far from the station, you need about 10min walk for the so call short cut cause the roads were slippery.... but i read that the hotel rooms were big so i still gave it a shot since our other hotels will be small... but lesson learnt, chose the nearest hotel to the train station if you had heavy luggage..... cause it snowed, all the roads were slippery & icy, so hubby had a hard time lugging our luggage to the hotel....

after depositing our bags in the hotel, we walked around the train station area before boarding the train to karuizawa.... one of my favourite place to visit in japan is their supermarkets....

sushi section

seafood section

meat section

bakery

 see, everything in the supermarket also look so pretty & appetizing!!!! so of cause we also gotten some snack to munch on the way.... so our next stop is karuizwa, it's actually along the way to nagano & many people go there for skiing...

on the way to karuizawa

along the way

karuizawa

karuizawa station

map of karuizawa

so from my search, there are 2 main place to visit in karuizawa, the shopping center on one side and the more historic section on the other end.... so we first visit the kyu-karuizawa side....

skiing resort near karuizawa station

frozen pond near karuizawa station

pretty kimono we saw along the way

shops along kyu-karuizawa

you can see from my pictures that karuizawa is much colder than tokyo & lots of places were covered in snow... so it was pretty cold there but we were still very excited to see so much snow =) actually the main thing that i want to go to kyu-karuizawa was to get to usui pass observation platform since you can view karuizawa from  there.... we took like almost 1hr to reach kyu-karuizawa cause we took a wrong turn.... we looked at the map & couldnt find usui pass so we went to ask the tourist center & to our astonishment, the staff told us that it would take a 30min taxi ride up or a 1.5hr walk!!! we like WTH!!!! the information online said took about 30min walk from kyu-karuizawa!!!! so much discrepancy!!! so no choice, we had to forgo the observatory since we were exhausted.... we wanted to have our lunch but there wasnt much restaurant along the way so we had to walk to karuizawa prince plaza to grab a bite....

karuizawa price shopping plaza

lunch

so we had our lunch at this quite atas looking sushi place cause the other stores were full of people!!! but the taste was really not too bad, really fresh seafood but just too expensive..... after filling our stomach we went to walk around the place & only then i realised this was an outlet mall... haha.....

shops

nice moon view

night view of the plaza

 like all outlet malls, they mainly have angmoh brands so i didnt walk around too much but hubby managed to get a new pair of shoes at nike =) after a long day, we retired back to our hotel.... one very nice thing about the hotel was that they actually brought our luggage up to our room!!! very nice gesture especially we were so exhausted at the end of the day =)

hotel room

toilet

wardrobe

night snack

nice alcohol

the room was pretty big, 24sqm so we could open our luggage up & still have space to walk around.... but the sad thing was that there wasnt much food stores along nagano station area.... i prefer to eat at those cheapo vending machines stores like we had in tokyo but you can hardly find such stores here.... so we just gotten some snack from convenient stores for our dinner before getting ready for next day =)