$hotel->MakeReservation($date);

Yesterday after Japanese class and the associated breakfast Charles and I went over to his place and started choosing hotels. We already had a few in mind but we hadn't made any reservations. We were starting to cut it pretty close. We are aiming for hanami season which is a major time for Japanese people to take vacations. Hence the hotels are filling up fast.

Over the past week or so I have been taking the hotels we were considering and placing placemarks in Google Earth where they are along with all the things on our respective "shit-lists" (Charles and I are maintaining independent lists of stuff we want to do while in Japan and they have been dubbed the shit-lists).

Google Earth let us see exactly where the hotels were in relation to what we wanted to do. This is actually pretty hard to do. GE doesn't seem to want to do translations of addresses from English to Japanese (don't blame it), and some hotels were not listing their addresses in Japanese, only English. So then we would have to look at the map on the hotel's website to try to figure out where it is. Those maps are only sort of helpful. They are not even remotely to scale. North as an orientation is optional and they only show major streets. What they really are is a map of local landmarks. "Turn left at the police station and go until you get to a 7-11. Turn right there and walk for 5 minutes." Not exactly helpful when looking at satellite images. Some hotels were much harder to find than others.

We discarded selections that were just too far away. There was one hotel that looked amazing. Absolutely beautiful and not too expensive but there was only one thing on the lists that was even remotely close. So we took it out of the running.

Also we checked on the websites of the hotels. Some listed the availability of rooms. Some of our top picks were already full up.

After we settled on some that were fairly close to various things and not too expensive and not full up we started emailing them to ask for reservations. The first we emailed got back to us almost right away saying they were full up for the week we wanted. Strike it from the list!

Eventually we sent emails to three different hotels (one in Osaka, one in Miyajima and one in Tokyo). That settled we went downstairs and ordered some Chinese food.

We were both in the mood for general tso's chicken so we got two orders of that and some soup (won-ton for me, hot and sour for Charles) and rice. The different versions of general tso's chicken are very diverse. Some are crunchy and some are not. Some are really hot some are not. Some are very saucy and some have just enough sauce to say there is sauce on there. This version was somewhere in the middle.

While we ate we watched a Japanese drama on TV. It had the girl who stared in Shall We Dansu? (at least I'm pretty sure it was her. How many other ballet dancer/actresses with ears like that are there in Japan?) as a ballet dancer who's star is rapidly rising having to put everything in her life on hold when her father is in an accident and left an invalid. On the whole it was pretty standard fare for a Japanese drama.

Afterwards, I headed home and as soon as I got in the door I checked my email. All three hotels had responded saying they had space and confirmed our reservations. Awesomeness.

Damn, this has been a rambling, pointless post. All I really wanted to do was post links to the hotels we had reserved. So here they are:

Osaka (March 17th through March 23rd):
Hotel Chuo

Miyajima (March 23th through March 24):
Miyajima Grand Hotel Arimoto
(The Japanese version of the page is much nicer looking than the English page, so I am linking there)

Tokyo (March 24th through April 1st):
Aizuya Inn