It's official! We've bought our plane tickets today, and we're going to Japan on the 7th of May for our honeymoon!

We decided a couple of months ago that since we're having such a small wedding (which is mostly for our families, to be honest), we should have a fantastic honeymoon (which is all, all for us). So we started looking at the Intrepid catalogues, and fell in love with both the tours of Indochina (Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam), and, of course, Japan. I know they are excellent tour guides, but after adding everything (they don't include flights in their prices, you just have to make your own way there) it was a whoppingly expensive Trip. Mr. Cisco, however, is pretty resourceful, and was soon surfing the Internets to see just how much the trip would cost if we did it by ourselves. We finally reached the conclusion that if we bypassed even websites like Expedia, and booked rooms directly in the hotels' websites, the trip would cost half. Yes, lovelies, half. And we're talking high end hotels here, not traditional inns, which would be lovely, but we like our creature comforts, I'm afraid to say, and the really nice ones are more expensive than hotels. So we're staying in Tokyo, then Hakone (the picture up there), then Kyoto, then Tokyo again for shopping, all in Hyatts, and taking day trips to other lovely places. It's going to be fantastic!

Now, I should probably mention that, of most of our friends (with the exception of just two) we are the least Japanophiles of the lot. Two of them even founded a Youth Organisation dedicated to Japanese culture! And then there's the obsessives of Japanese music, Fashion, manga and anime... I mean, all of them. They even speak the language, which we don't. And we get to go first, which is..ironic.  I think it shows they are wonderful people that they're excited for us, and happy. We'll bring them back loads of presents!

Japan, of course, means very different things for everyone, us and our friends included. While we like anime, we're certainly not connoisseurs, and while I like jfashion as much as anyone, I don't collect fashion bibles and obsess about certain brands. But we're going for the culture, and the history, and the food, and by the sheer thrill of going somewhere on the other side of the world. We're going because we love the literature, and the cinema, and everything that makes Japan such an enigma. So I guess you can't say fairer than that.

Now we only need to books the rooms, and we're all set! Now to plan the actual wedding..