During this trip I took over 1000 photos. Bandwidth used to be more expensive and I used to have less money so considerably less photos have appeared online from the 90s or early 2000s but I did dig up some new ones to finally share online. In 2016 when I visited Hokkaido for the second time I apparently took over two hundred photos in just a few days, but most have not appeared online and I’m a Flickr Pro.
The fact I pay for both webhosting and for a Flickr Pro account implies I should upload more photos to the Internet so this trip I did. The best photos will also appear in this post as that is what people really care about, not the written word.
Planning
Planning, we’re still talking about planning? Actually very little time will be spent talking about planning as I did not do as much as I did for my trip to Scotland, however I did do some research online and I bought and read two books. This includes probably the third copy of the Lonely Planet Japan I’ve purchased. I think I had one in 1992 and probably in 2004, but perhaps not whatever edition was available in 2016. Once again I left my Lonely Planet behind in Japan where it may help a future traveller.
Touring Twelve Distilleries
This was the second to last post I wrote, so it will either be the most popular or the least. It will appeal to discerning individuals with impeccable taste and a willingness to leave the tourist hotspots of Tokyo, Kyoto and Osaka behind to travel the less trodden path; from the Westernmost part of Saitama to the deep South of rural Kyushu. If you’re feeling brave, bold, and thirsty, this is the blog post for you.
I assure you it took some planning to tour twelve distilleries in Japan, luckily I outsourced the planning to Rascal + Thorn. You would have already known that if you’d read the blog post about planning. Below you can see some of my treasures from the Orient.
K is for Kyushu, Kagoshima and Kumamoto
Kyushu is the Southernmost of Japan’s four major islands and the only one I had not visited. I had already visited Hokkaido twice and even made it to Shinjuku, but never further South than that. Kagoshima literally has a volcano, you’ll see it in a lot of my pictures. Kumamoto has the most famous mascot in Japan and Fukuoka supposedly has the largest entertainment district in Japan.
However as Kyushu isn’t Tokyo, Kyoto, or Osaka you probably don’t care. Also for the record Fukuoka has two k’s in it.
Chillaxing In Nara Japan
Japan’s first permanent capital was not Tokyo, nor was it Kyoto, it was in fact Nara. Nara was the capital of Japan during its namesake period from 710 to 794. So although Tokyo and Kyoto are bigger and were the capital of Japan longer, Nara still has a lot of history, temples, and shrines. It is also a lot smaller than Tokyo or even Kyoto so it is much easier to see on foot.
For the record you can indeed feed the deer they are easy to find in Nara Park. Nara is definitely worth a visit even if you do it as a day trip from Kyoto or Osaka.
Returning to Toyohashi
When I lived in Japan it was not in a world famous city like Tokyo, Kyoto or Osaka. I took the first teaching job I was offered and I lived in Toyohashi which even the Japanese don’t seem to know a lot about. It is in Aichi prefecture near Nagoya. What Toyohashi is famous for is being basically the port where Toyota exported a lot of cars to the rest of the world.
Toyohashi is also on the shinkansen route so anyone travelling from Tokyo to Kyoto or Osaka passes right through it. The most famous thing to do is visit during one of the major festivals but as an actual stop on the shinkansen line and a more industrial part of Japan there are lots of little bars and restaurants near the train station a few of them including one ramen shop I still rave about may have become famous as the Internet has gotten bigger.
Did you visit Tokyo?
Of course I visited Tokyo. I’ve been to Tokyo at least a half dozen times. However this may be the first time I’ve written an entire blog post about Tokyo and I’ve been using WordPress for over twenty years. What I used to do in Tokyo was shop, mainly for books and CDs but also for items not easy to find in Toyohashi. I even once travelled to Tokyo to write an exam.
No exams were written on this trip, but I did submit my final project for my Python for Finance class just before leaving. I didn’t get the results until I was midway through the penultimate blog post of this series, but for the record I did pass, however you probably don’t want to read about that. I even already registered for my next professional development course while drinking in Nara, because I’m a professional.
Tokyo gets a third paragraph because it still may be the world’s largest city. There is probably a bigger one in Asia, but it isn’t as nice. Tokyo is indeed too big, so it is better to think of each major neighbourhood as its own smaller city. This trip I didn’t do much shopping, but we did a lot of drinking and eating. Tokyo is one of the great cities in the world for drinking, shopping, and eating, however it does have historical sites as well as art and culture. I really need to visit Tokyo and Japan again, maybe next decade.
Traveling in Japan Advice
I was going to write more about the optimal usage of rail passes in Japan or the best way to get your mobile phone working while you’re a tourist in Japan. However, I never had time to research those topics exhaustively before I left, others have of course done this, but did they visit twelve distilleries? I took a lot of trains while on this trip to Japan, most of the time I paid the premium to use the shinkansen, this premium can come on top of your JR Rail pass if you opt to buy one. Another oddity is you basically need two tickets to take the shinkansen.
In Japan you can get basically a mobile wireless device that runs on a battery, someone else in my tour group may have had one of those. You can also get e-sims. It probably pays to shop around, but I’m not going to recommend any service. You may need to do either of these things in the airport when you arrive. At the hotel in Tokyo I stayed at before leaving Japan, they advertised the former service. You can also just turn on roaming from your mobile provider back home and see how much the bill comes to, that is what I ended up doing. There is also free WiFi all over Japan, even on the shinkansen, but the quality of the connection varies.
One thing I will recommend is the airport limousine, basically an express bus to the airport. The problem being when your plane lands it may not be running. There are of course trains and the subway but if you have a lot of luggage, which a lot of people in my tour group did, the airport limousine is nice as porters help you load and unload your bags. Researching this and factoring it into your hotel choice in Tokyo or another major city would be a wise thing to do. Japan also has luggage forwarding services.
Where to next?
It will be a while before I take another trip to Japan or anywhere. This one was not cheap, then I paid my taxes and then I paid tuition to Fitch Learning. We’ll see if I can complete the CQF in a timely manner, I probably will not take another trip this long until that is finished. If you really want to read more about my travels I suggest starting with the summary of my trip to Scotland or the summary of one of my trips to China. If you still want more travelogs I’ve collected the best travelogs into one post. Of course you can leave a comment about my trip or your trip to Japan.
]]>This tour was lead by Charles from Rascal + Thorn. He is also @whiskey_traveling on Instagram so I will embed his almost daily summaries of our time together in Japan. Also on this tour was Stamford who is @japan_whisky_tours on Instagram. He made less posts than Charles, but more than me to the ‘Gram. I don’t use Instagram all that much, but I have been uploading my best photos to this Flickr album. There were a number of other whisky enthusiasts or maniacs as Stamford kept calling us on this tour. So more images may have already have appeared on social media, I know I took over 1000 photos while in Japan.
The embedded Instagram posts may work until they don’t this is why I prefer Flickr after twenty plus years in the blogosphere.
Executive Summary of Japan Whisky Tour
When I was planning this trip, of course I was planning to update my blog afterwards. I decided to divide the trip into six blog posts of which this was the fifth to be written and thus the penultimate blog post of the series. However as it became longer and longer and I realized it is unlikely many people will read it. This didn’t overly bother me as I learned a lot writing it and most of my blog posts, few people read.
There are entirely too many experts out there telling you how to become a social media influencer. Yoast the former of employer of Joost suggests a blog post be at least 300 words, this post is over six thousand. I had always planned for the last post in the series to be a summary. However, as it has taken me weeks to partially write five blogs posts, the final summary post may still be another week away, hence the executive summary, for people who lack commitment to read.
In March of 2026, several adventurous individuals met up in Tokyo, travelled to Chichibu, Kagoshima, Kumamoto, Fukuoka and various places in between to tour the following distilleries:
We also visited the following whisky bars:
- Aloha
- Milwaukee
- The Highlander Inn: Chichibu
- Te Airigh
- BB13 Bar
- Bar Masquerade
- Bar Amber
- Bar Higuchi
- Bar Kitchen
It is possible some people did some extra drinking, you know had a beer or two with their ramen, tonkatsu, sushi, sashimi, yakitori, udon, or soba. But fear not, temples and shrines were visited, photographs were taken, shopping was done, but the really short summary is twelve distilleries were toured and this post documents that fact in some depth.
Tokyo
Our official tour itinerary was to start at 11:00 AM at a train station in Tokyo, but no way was I cutting it that close and I think everyone arrived a day or two earlier in Japan. Most of us stayed at the same hotel in Minato, a district in Tokyo I may never have visited before. We did travel around together in Tokyo including up Tokyo Tower, which I survived. Later we went to two whisky bars: Milwaukee and Aloha.
I already wrote an entire post about visiting Tokyo again. I had previously visited first in 1992. I even dug out an old baseball cap for a J-League soccer team from that time to wear throughout this trip. Note the Cleveland Browns hat and X-men Issue #1 Jim Lee t-shirt in the picture below, some of us are true diehards.
Chichibu
Chichibu is famous for more than just Chichibu Distillery but it is doubtful we would have spent two nights there if not for the distillery. We of course saw shrines, ate Japanese food, I even got some ramen, people did some shopping, but the highlight was a private tour of Chichibu Distillery.
The story of Chichibu Distillery has been told many times now, I think I had to tell it the other night over drams. Basically the founder Ichiro bought up the last of the whisky made by his grandfather and then opened one of the first new whisky distilleries in Japan in years. He had previously worked for Suntory, his child may work there now. Here is a detailed account of touring the distillery by Thomas of Whisky Saga.
Chichibu Distillery is a bit old fashioned, they were even doing some floor malting while we were there. They do have an official Instagram, but perhaps not a website. Generally they don’t do tours, however they do have a gift shop so they must do some, supposedly only for industry folks. You may have to buy the bottles in town and we learned many businesses have prospered alongside the growth of the distillery. For instance, there is a whisky cask in the Shinto Shrine.
For a town the size of Chichibu, it has a disproportionate number of whisky bars. We visited Te Airigh @te.airigh the first night and the Highlander Inn @highlander_inn_chichibu the second night. That was an expensive night for Mr. Hamilton, but at least he remembers buying the rounds, some people seem to not recollect we stopped for pizza and beer on the way back to the hotel. We never quite made it to Craic, but we did try the first night in Chichibu. Charles and Stamford have been there many times and recommend it.
Te Airigh
Both Te Airigh and the Highlander Inn served Black Isle beer. Now I didn’t tour that brewery but I almost stayed at it. It is in Inverness or near Inverness. I also visited the original Highlander Inn as part of the Highland Whisky Academy with Mike. He’s been busy, I read he’s expanding his businesses. I gave Charles and Stamford the few contacts I had in Scotland, or at least their Instagrams, so we’ll see if they cross paths someday.
Highlander Inn
Chichibu Distillery
More of the town of Chichibu
Getting to and from Chichibu can be done by train. You need to hire a car or taxi to get to the distillery but it isn’t far from town. The town of Chichibu isn’t very big. We basically just walked everywhere except the train station as some people had a lot of luggage, which became a whole lot of luggage as the trip went on they bought more and more “souvenirs”.
I even managed to do the laundry in Chichibu. The hotel also gave us a token we could spend at the beer vending machine, so I got the biggest strongest beer they had. There are not a lot of hotel options in Chichibu and the one we stayed at is considered the best, it is called the Hotel Route Inn Grand. It had the best washing machine / combo dryer we encountered on our whole trip.
Coin laundry technology has improved over the last twenty years, of course I think I stayed at nicer hotels this trip than I did back in the day. Later in Fukuoka I even skipped out on drinking whisky once to use an inferior laundry machine that took hours to dry my clothes.
Kagoshima
We flew to Kagoshima, but as we started the day in Chichibu, some of us may have been a tad green in the gills. It was two taxis to the train station, then the train back to Tokyo, then probably a subway or two, then the airport shuttle, then we had time to kill at Haneda Airport. So the first night in Kagoshima we did not do much drinking, we did famously go for Unagi but ended up not getting any Unagi at the Unagi restaurant because they were out of Unagi.
Mars Tsunuki Distillery
This was the first distillery we visited in Kyushu. I wrote about all the other things we did in Kyushu which consisted of a lot of driving but we also took trains and trams. Mars Tsunuki is named after the brightest star in the sky, which of course turned out to be a planet. The distillery sits on the site of an even older distillery and the distillery is still owned by the family and their ancestral home is now the tasting room.
There are dunnage style warehouses and even a column still in which they make gin. We got to try three drams, then a bonus dram. Everyone agreed the bonus dram was the best. It was a Mizanura single cask. We inquired about buying a bottle as everyone wanted one including both guides, in the end none of a us got a bottle. Let that be a lesson kids, don’t be greedy.
Inside the tasting room, besides a store where I got omiyage for someone in Tokyo, is also a bar where you can buy more drams. I only bought one more dram and even though we were told we could, I don’t think anyone took their drams outside into the Japanese garden. I did go out and explored the garden and took a bunch of photos some of which I uploaded to Flickr. Eventually our tour ended and we boarded our jumbo taxi to head towards the next distillery but first we had lunch on the beach.
There aren’t many accounts of touring Mars Tsunuki Distillery in English, but they have been on people’s radar for a while.
Kanosuke Distillery
This was the second distillery we visited in Kyushu. We visited it the same day we visited Mars Tsunuki Distillery, after our lunch by the seaside. This lunch had an amazing view but it might have been the third most popular place we stopped for lunch in Kyushu. The most popular distillery we visited was probably Chichibu but once we were on Kyushu there was definitely some friendly competition for best distillery tour on the Southernmost Island.
I seem to be more forgiving than some, I mean any day you get to tour a whisky distillery is a good day.
The host at Kanosuke distillery spoke good English even though his accent was hard to place. As a former English teacher I suspect he learned English in two different places or from two different primary sources or teachers. Some of his pronunciation reminded me of an Anzac accent but he didn’t use words like “heaps”. I had a Kiwi rugby coach once so I know if you don’t say “heaps” every 23rd word you’re not a real Kiwi.
Beyond his pronunciation, he was really informative and tried really hard. I forget how many whisky distilleries he had visited, but it was more than me, and it included if not every distillery we toured in Japan then most of them. So he was often contrasting how things were done at Kanosuke versus Mars or some other distillery.
If you thought the tasting room at Mars Tsunuki overlooking a Japanese garden would be tough to beat, the tasting room at Kanosuke, the Mellow Bar, overlooks a beach and you get to pick your own vinyl record. Van the Man was playing when we arrived, but we switched to Nina Simone at Stamford’s insistence. Maybe next time, he who owns the most vinyl gets to choose the record, just a suggestion for a house rule.
Kanosuke has a gift shop where I got a small distillery exclusive recharred shochu cask whisky bottle for me and one for Bill too. Konosuke apparently uses a greater percentage of recharred shochu casks in their whisky than most distillers in Japan. Many of the distilleries we toured in Japan started out making shochu or even only made shochu. I was not the first blogger to tour this distillery.
BB13 Bar
I don’t know if BB13, @bb13bar on Instagram, is the best whisky bar in Kagoshima but it would be among the top whisky bars in Kagoshima. We did not visit on Sunday March 8th, neither my memory nor the metadata agree with the itinerary. What the bar is famous for is having a very large selection of bottles from Mars Tsunuki distillery including their most famous bottle which is 3 plus 25.
Luckily I took a picture of the bottle as I remembered the name wrong.
This whisky is a marriage of two old casks from two different distilleries which were then aged for an additional three years at another facility North of Kyushu. You can see the World Whiskies Awards sticker on the bottle above. It won best blended malt in the world in 2013. The other thing you can do in Japan is buy what they call a half measure. Normally when you order a whisky in America or elsewhere you’ll get one ounce. But in Japan they are going to measure everything in a jigger that is in millilitres. So a “half measure” is going to be half as many millilitres as a “full measure” which will be about an ounce.
This did not bother me, I can’t remember what a half measure of this particular award winning whisky cost that night, but ordering a half measure allows you try more whiskies and not feel bad about it. You can always order more whisky or even a beer. I ordered a beer at BB13 which was from a brewery we’d never seen before, so eventually more people tried their beer. The beer is called Ogna but the brewery might be called Komagatake.
BB13 also might have a full kitchen, something we did not know about as maybe Charles and Stamford had never been there. We’d actually gone for ramen on our way to the whisky bar but you could dine and enjoy drams afterwards if you are too classy for random ramen and beer.
Hinokami Distillery
This distillery is in a rural part of Kyushu, so you may get some rural smells as you drive up. The distillery is really new but has this big Brutalist visiting centre. They don’t have a lot of whisky they can sell you, but they do have newmake and have already started winning awards.
The distillery itself resembles a glass cube. They also have cooperage where they assemble and repair barrels. This is another distillery that has extensive experience in making shochu. Their tasting room also has a view of a volcano. They call it the Red Bar and there very much seems to be an arms race among shochu distilleries in Kyushu to move into whisky and awe visitors with views while they enjoy a dram.
I do believe we also got try some of their shochu. Clear shochu generally has not been aged for very long and certainly not in sherry casks from Spain. I don’t want to shock you, but just like whisky distilleries have been aging their spirit in wooden casks that previously held other spirits, the shochu producers have adopted the same technique and it does enhance the flavor. Shochu can also include ingredients other than barley, it is most commonly made with sweet potatoes and rice, but you can add something like plums similar to making a fruit beer. We would learn more and more about shochu as we toured more and more distilleries.
Hinokami has a second tasting room. It is anechoic chamber. Besides being a hard word to spell, when you are locked in a dark room with some people you just met and several stemmed glasses, shit could goes down. Obviously I’m exaggerating, but when I smelled the two drams I immediately got the peat note. The challenge was to decide which dram was 1% peated whisky in the formula. After a few minutes in the dark, doubt creeps in, but I stuck with my answer and apparently I was the most confident of my group.
Was I correct? Do you think I’d write five paragraphs about being wrong?
Actually, I probably would.
Akayane Distillery
The competition for favourite distillery may have been over in some people’s minds after we visited the very first one of the trip, however ranking distilleries or even drams is a personal choice. I don’t think any of us took detailed tasting notes like the Swedes did while I was in Scotland, however this distillery was among the least popular of the trip.
I however, liked it. It was full of surprises. This is where we may have got our first in depth instruction into shochu making. They do have a view of the volcano just not from the tasting room. The reason other people didn’t like it I can only speculate. One they didn’t have any whisky for us to try. It isn’t that they are not making whisky, but we mostly tasted gin and other spirits. The owner or president actually showed up mid-tour, but mainly I just think this tour was long.
These clay vessels are used in the shochu making.
The shochu stills are not made of copper.
Column stills are usually used to make gin or grain whisky.
More stills at Akayane Distillery.
Yet another still, this one is made in Germany!
Alembic style still made by the Chalvignac Group in France.
More shochu aging in a ceramic vessel buried in the ground.
It is a fine balance between showing off your production facility and allowing the tour group to actually try your product. Akayane Distillery has no gift shop currently, but they gave us a gift and as long as you wanted to drink gin or mystery spirits you could drink as much as you wanted maybe. I was at the front and drank more gin than I’ve ever drank in my life. I felt bad as no one wanted to try their wares, he’d pull out another bottle and there were few volunteers to try the mystery spirit.
They had stills that were made in Japan, made in Germany, France even some made in Italy, this is detailed on their webpage. They didn’t have any that were made in Scotland, but they were clearly trying stuff and the consensus best spirit we tried was a bottle they could only market as “plum spirit”. In order to be shochu, the alcohol content cannot be too high, though I think you can add plums to shochu. In Scotland and indeed most countries, whisky must be at least 40% ABV, but shochu can be lower, plum spirit however, there are no rules with plum spirit and it might have been 60% ABV. Who knows, I don’t even think it had a label.
Ontake Distillery
Ontake Distillery must be closer to Kagoshima than some of the other distilleries we visited as we visited it just before we left Kagoshima to head to Kumamoto. This was the one I dubbed “the whisky distillery that shochu built”. Ontake is owned by Nishi Shuzo, a longtime shochu producer and we got to tour their shochu operations, we even got to try some shochu right from the cask.
These shochu stills look traditional, but are made of steel.
These tables are used for mixing the rice with koji which is done when making shochu.
These casks are aging shochu not whisky.
Shochu straight from the cask.
The view from the shochu tasting room at Ontake.
Next we drove to a building in which they make sake. Sake is apparently really sensitive so we could only look through a door at that facility, the actual whisky distillery is further up the mountain. I think we even annoyed the manager giving the tour as we immediately wanted to snap photos of the view. You can see why below.
Nishi Shuzo are actually still building the visitor centre and they are also modifying the golf course and adding a hotel, so in the near future you could stay on the side of the mountain enjoying the view whether from the golf course, your hotel room, a hot spring, or if you’re facing the right way, from the tasting room inside the whisky distillery. Now you’ll see why I described the whisky distilleries in Kyushu as being in an arms race, some firms are investing a lot of money both to increase production capacity but also to capture dollars from whisky tourism.
Apparently I am not the first blogger to tour this distillery and be impressed by the view. A perk for being a golf club member is you can have your own private whisky cask. I didn’t forget this, I just have been typing so much I got carpel tunnel syndrome. I’m of course jesting, but this post has turned out to be beyond long.
Here is an interview with Yoichiro Nishi, the CEO of the company behind this distillery, explaining why they built a distillery on a golf course overlooking a volcano.
The actual Ontake Distillery as viewed coming back from the warehouse.
The actual whisky made by Ontake Distillery.
Kumamoto
Amazingly after all this typing, I’m not even sure we are half way done summarizing the tour put on by Rascal + Thorn and Charles & Stamford. Kumamoto is bigger than Kagoshima but smaller than Fukuoka. This means there are more dining and drinking options in the Kumamoto, but we only stayed here two nights. The distilleries we visited were smaller and perhaps less famous, but they’ll all be more famous now that I have blogged about them. They all made shochu but the first one also made rice whisky. The last one had a single malt whisky among their products, I brought home a 200 ml bottle.
Kumamoto has a very famous mascot and you see him in the train station, at your hotel, and yes even on the bottles and boxes when you tour distilleries. His name is Kumamon. I think you can even meet him, our hotel was right by the train station as was an entire store devoted to him in which he appears regularly.
Fukano Distillery
Fukano is not one of the larger producers of shochu or rice whisky, but their product is available in North America and one of the people on the tour apparently has a fondness for it. At this distillery we got another explanation on how shochu is made and got to see ceramic pots that were made over one hundred years ago and are still buried in the ground at this distillery. Imagine how much shochu they have produced!
We also got to try various products, but I don’t think they had any rice whisky for us to try, some people do really like rice whiksy, but it isn’t made from barley so will not qualify as a single malt for you purists. On this day however we never got to try any. It is mainly sold on the export market with shochu dominating sales locally. There are quite a few reviews online. The distillery of course had product with Kumamon on the packaging. Manufacturers can use him on their packaging if their product comes from Kumamoto prefecture.
After touring this distillery we went for lunch which was another hit with this tour group, but the next distillery proved even more popular than this one.
Rokuchoshi Distillery
This distillery specialized in shochu including the aging and blending of it. Our tour was conducted basically by the owner and his son and we got to try at least five different products. There was considerable debate whether the more heavily sherried but younger shochu was better than older sherry matured shochu. In the end some people ended up buying both.
For the record I preferred the second to last dram, but I did not buy a bottle of either. Here are more professional reviews of their product than I could ever do. It is a real surprise that they store their sherry casks upstairs but they have a room which they try to control the climate of, including the humidity. I don’t know how many sherry casks they have full of shochu but quite a few. This distillery might have been a bit bigger and more famous than Fukano, but again my lack of detailed notes on still capacity is starting to show.
Amazingly according to my collection of photos we went to a third distillery this day, I think this is the only day we toured three distilleries in one day. Besides climate controlled aging in sherry casks, the packaging at Rokuchoshi is also famous, some of it was designed by Keisuke Serizawa. Besides winning awards their shochu was also chosen to be served at a prestigious French restaurant, I believe it has Michelin Stars for you foodies.
Oishi Distillery
Oishi Distillery also makes shochu but they are making whisky too. We got to try both and we were even given a small bottle of shochu. I actually bought another bottle of shochu. I was the only person who bought the bottle with the Japanese Giant Hornet in it.
It is interesting seeing the webpages of the distilleries we toured and recognizing people. The Oishi Distillery website features Kazunori Oishi who led our tour group. Presumably, a group of foreign tourists touring a dozen distilleries must be uncommon. As you can see on the website they also make whisky from rice, that was the theme of the day.
We did ask the owner why he made shochu with a “murder hornet” in the bottle, I forget the exact answer, but my suspicion is to sell to tourists, especially tourists from China. My friend Bill wasn’t impressed I bought it, but his partner was. I think she photographed all the bottles I brought home, something I still haven’t done myself. I was a bit worried that bottle would not make it back to Canada, but it is safe in Calgary should you crave murder hornet infused shochu.
At Oishi their shochu production seems greater than their whisky production just going by still size. You also must age whisky for at least three years, but shochu can be sold aged considerably less. This distillery was definitely still in Kumamoto prefecture as I saw Kumamon on some packaging.
As the owner was once again giving us the tour, he pretty much could do whatever he wanted, so we got to sample shochu, new make, and even some whisky straight oughta something. I believe they were going to bottle this whisky soon. Some of the small distilleries we toured this day bottle on site and hand label everything.
We also climbed up and down and all over the place. Later, I spotted an octave cask that was freshly arrived and we got to see various other special casks, even some owned by local whisky bars, something we also saw at Ontake the day before. Oishi is definitely another up and coming whisky producer in Kyushu.
Japanese rice whisky must be having a moment and maybe the entire Japanese whisky industry is, witness me going on a tour with several other enthusiasts. I didn’t do much research on individual distilleries prior to booking this tour and this one wasn’t even on the last itinerary I was sent, but I had no trouble finding bloggers reviewing this whisky, not sure how many have ever toured this distillery.
I could not find a video from Charles until later on in the evening when we visited a whisky bar. At Oishi, they had a piece of equipment labeled an iStill which looked really new and I’ve since found out is made in the Netherlands. I think they plan to use it to make small batch whisky but potentially other spirits. Neither Charles or I had seen one of those before, and we’ve seen some things. The manufacturer’s website has more information than I could ever hope to convey, I think we got a one sentence or less explanation, but yes that is a square whisky still.
Kumamoto Whisky Bars
Fukuoka may be more famous for whisky bars. In the book I’m reading, a character said they have the largest entertainment district in Japan. I know I was surprised how big Fukuoka was. When I lived in Japan it was in Toyohashi, which also seems to have more bars than I remembered. Tokyo of course may have the most bars in the world, I would not want to bet against Tokyo.
Some bars in Japan, you must make reservations for and some are more like private clubs and you need an invitation, you just can’t walk in off the street. The two bars we visited were known as Bar Masquerade and Bar Amber. We visited Bar Amber first on the night we arrived, it is quite well lit and based on my photos I had three drams including one from the Scotch Malt Whisky Society.
At Bar Masquerade, I think I also had three drams. The bar top at Bar Amber was this huge slab of burled wood, the bar top at Bar Masquerade had roses embedded in it, you’ll have to decide for yourself which is more photogenic. The proprietor is on Istagram as @suehiroyasutaka3
Fukuoka
Our final three nights of the tour were spent in Fukuoka, a city I know much more about since visiting. The hotel we stayed at caused us some confusion and Hakata station was also much bigger than the train stations in Kagoshima or Kumamoto. The end result was a little less sleep, we also twice tried to get into one Izakaya but could not. In the end an alternate restaurant was found both evenings and everyone was able to leave town on time, but before that we toured three more distilleries and visited two famous whisky bars.
Shindo Distillery
The journey to Shindo Distillery also known as Shindo Lab from Fukuoka was quite long, but perhaps not as long a journey as the journey the next day. We took a variety of means of transport including a train, a cab, and a bus. The distillery itself was new and modern. Our tour was conducted by Michiaki Shinozaki and we got to meet his sister and father who happened to be in town. The reason we got such a high profile tour guide was the date we visited and key staff being elsewhere.
Once again we were allowed to go most everywhere and film everything, but there was one top secret piece of equipment we were not allowed to photograph, so that is all I’m going to say about that. The equipment at Shindo was made by a Japanese company called Miyake which actually made a lot of the equipment we’d see at previous distilleries. I believe Mars, Kanosuke, Hinokami, and Ontake all had whisky stills made by this firm, they are the major supplier of stills made in Japan.
Shindo also has roots in sake and shochu production and we actually saw another one of their facilities as we were driving through the countryside. 88 Bamboo has already written about this distillery and if you’d been checking all the links I’ve been sharing they have visited a number of the distilleries we toured, so I could use their account to bolster my own memory.
One unique thing for this tour, was the opportunity to handfill a bottle. I never did this, nor did I do it Scotland. I stuck to my ethos of trying to travel light, but we did all sample many drams including some newmake and single casks. Some people on the tour even sampled some other spirits. It was also another busy day for the gift shop employees. I bought a 200ml bottle. Minis are not common at Japanese distilleries but sometimes you can get a 200ml to take home as a souvenir or as omiyage.
Kuju Distillery
This distillery is in Kuju, this matters as I think this was the longest we spent riding in a jumbo taxi. Somehow I got the front seat this time and dutifully took pictures of the countryside. You’ll have to visit Flickr to see them all.
Kuju Distillery was another popular stop on this tour. Our tour was conducted by the founder and CEO himself, Mr. Shoji Utoda. Once again we pretty much had the run of the place as he specifically opened it up on the weekend so we could tour his distillery. We got to try several single casks whiskies. We also got to try the sour beer and climb over all the equipment.
The stills at Kuju are from Forsyths, something I got several good pictures showing off. These stills were made in Scotland to the specifications of Mr. Utoda. Determining the size of your primary still and low wines still, as well as the length and the line arm and whether it slopes up or down are key decisions when building a whisky distillery. You can alter the yeast and barley, but you are stuck with the water source you choose and Kuju apparently has excellent water.
These were not the only stills from Forsyths we saw while in Japan. Chichibu also uses stills from Forsyths. Again I never took detailed notes on production batch size, but this distillery was smaller than some we toured, but I’m not sure it had the lowest production but then again it might.
This was also a really surprising visit as we came a long way and were not disappointed. There was even talk of us pooling our funds to buy our own cask, but that was deemed impractical. Kuju is really a long way from Calgary so I wouldn’t be able to visit my cask very often and neither would anyone else on the tour. We did see some casks which were bought by people including the owner of Bar Higuchi with whom Mr. Utoda founded Whisky Talk Fukuoka.
We also got to see the very first cask laid down, something we got to see at Oishi Distillery as well. This cask has the signatures of various people who helped set up the equipment, getting it up and running so Kuju could begin whisky production. Mr. Utoda also made us “brand ambassadors” I’m not sure how official my role is, but you should try and find some Kuju whisky. He is actively looking for people who do want to buy their own single cask, I can put you in touch, his card is on my desk. I only ended up buying a 200ml bottle, not an entire cask of whisky, but Kuju is definitely another up and coming Japanese whisky producer in Kyushu Japan.
Hikari Distillery
Last but definitely not least, we visited Hikari Distillery. This might have been a last minute addition as they had to open the distillery up on Sunday just for us! The owner basically lives on site and he and Tomoko Nagasue were our gracious hosts.
We were treated to tea and sweets then we toured the facility. Mr. Naoki Mitsuyasu personally climbed up to serve us right from the cask. It was a bit precarious but I believe everything turned out alright.
We saw many casks of shochu and of course we saw the stills used to make the shochu. At the end of the tour we were served even more tea and then gifted a bottle of our very own. I don’t know if anyone has tried it, I plan to save my bottle for a special occasion. This company may also make Hakata whisky if the Internet is to be believed but it might be made at another location now.
After our one of a kind personal tour we said our goodbyes to our hosts and walked back to the train station, we went back to Fukuoka and spent our final night together eating and drinking.
Fukuoka Whisky Bars
As mentioned earlier, Fukuoka has a very big and busy entertainment district. We visited Bar Higuchi after our tour of Shindo Lab and then the diehards may have visited Bar Kitchen two nights in a row. Both are very well known. Higuchi-san even appears in a Manga comic which you can view if you visit the bar. He may always wear a white suit. We actually got in a little bit of trouble when we laughed too hard at one of my jokes, but I don’t think we were banned for life, we were just “shushed”.
Here is someone else’s account of visiting Bar Higuchi.
Bar Kitchen may be even harder to get into so our technique was to go in two or so at a time, to disguise the fact we would take up seven seats at the bar. We spent our last night together here and although it was a struggle I did manage to buy a round. I believe it was a single cask Mars Tsunuki similar to the bottle we tried to buy at the distillery, however this one was a Calvados cask not a Mizunara cask. For the record, Mizunara is a type of oak found only in Northern Japan while Calvados is a type of brandy made in Normandy.
Some random blogger thinks this is the greatest bar in the world. You can go argue with that blogger, they haven’t updated their blog in almost ten years.
The next morning I did see some of my fellow travellers though some had to get up even earlier than me. I had bought a shinkansen ticket to Nara, well a shinkansen ticket to Shin Osaka. If you made it this far and want to leave a comment, I double dog dare you. This blog post is over 6000 words so there must be something you object to. If you want to read about me touring whisky distilleries in Scotland or my second trip to Hokkaido, you know what to do. I saved those links for the last paragraph.
]]>When I travelled to Japan in 1992 there was basically no Internet and no digital cameras. When I lived and worked in Europe approximately ten years later I didn’t have a digital camera and this web domain may not have been registered or was in a fledgling state. So when I finally returned to Japan in 2004 to teach English I made sure to have a digital camera and had this website up and running.
I didn’t have a laptop however, nor were digital cameras or cellphone cameras anywhere near what we have today. I updated this website with text editors on random computers in Internet Cafes. This blog was put online prior to going on exchange to Beijing, so my time there is much more documented than my time in Toyohashi. I also returned to Beijing sooner, agreeing to visit China in 2014. I even worked and taught English in Shanghai for much longer than I did in Japan.
Nonetheless Japan will always hold a special place in my heart. To the amazement of some and the disdain of others I’ve kept this website online for over twenty years, so in 2026 when I finally returned for an extended tour of Japan I knew I had to visit Toyohashi and try to dig up some old photos and mementos from my previous visits. However, I should have done more research, but I just didn’t have time and hadn’t given Toyohashi much thought recently. I missed out on seeing some things by only visiting on one Wednesday.
The view immediately after getting off the train. I never took the Shinkansen much back in the day, but I did travel by the Meitetsu Line to Nagoya and back many times.
I actually exited the hotel on the ground level, but came back to the hotel via the overpass before it started raining too much.
This is the street level view, though I likely spent most of my time on the other side of the street. I ended up taking the underpass before the light changed and found a surprise.
This is the alley beside the building in which I worked. There was an izakaya just down the alley on the left we always went to, including for my goodbye party.
When I returned to Toyohashi I had no doubt where I was staying though I couldn’t remember the name of the hotel. On my last night in Toyohashi prior to this I stayed at a different hotel just off to the left, it had a good view too, but the Hotel Associa is probably the biggest hotel in Toyohashi. It is attached to the train station making it super convenient. There might be an even more expensive boutique hotel on the other side, but because I worked on this side, lived on this side, this is the part of Toyohashi I know best.
Toyohashi Festivals
Toyohashi is not a famous tourist destination. It is on the Shinkansen train line and two others so it is easy enough to visit, you can fly to Nagoya international airport which is about an hour away. There was considerably less information on Japan online twenty plus years ago, now all the festivals I attended while living in Toyohashi are well documented.
I remember the demon festival and dutifully dug out a picture of the demon running by in 2004. I also remember so many fireworks, apparently Toyohashi is famous for fireworks. I remembered the dancing in the street though not the space shuttle. I read a blog post prior to returning to Japan about a blogger who visited Toyohashi who wanted to know about the space shuttle. I think it is a pachinko place but maybe someone can leave an answer in the comments. Finally I remembered and had grainy video taken on my keitai of people carrying a wooden shrine through the streets.
I almost never post video online and it isn’t in Apple Photos. It could still be on an old memory card. It is unlikely I would have deleted it. I do have backups going back to 2002, but I did lose some data to a hard drive issue in Beijing which I feared would cost me my MBA or at least delay graduation. I took another look for it just now and I could not find it. I should have put it in Apple Photos or iPhoto as it was known back then.
The dancing in the street festival in Toyohashi isn’t as famous as the one in Tokushima which I learned about when I visited Junichi another person who I likely have not heard from since I left Japan. That festival is called Awa Odori.
- Demon Festival – Oni Matsuri
- Fireworks Festival – Toyohashi Gio Festival
- Dancing in the Street Festival – Sou Odori parade
- Shrine Carrying Festival – Minato-machi Shinmei-sha Shrine Annual Festival
The next photo proves the space shuttle was there in 2003. I also had the foresight to go up a level to take a picture of all the people dancing in the street. At the end of the night they play “Auld Lang Syne” which I was told was the “go home song”. I don’t know if they still play it at the end of the night, leave a comment below if you are a Toyohashi festival regular.
Digital cameras have improved a lot since I lived in Toyohashi.
Toyohashi Then & Now
Twenty years ago, well closer to twenty-two years ago isn’t that long in the history of Japan and maybe not that much has changed in Toyohashi between living there and then visiting again in 2026, but I did scour my computer and the Internet for pictures and information. Paying for web hosting for twenty plus years wasn’t a small expense for an English teacher who had less than a 1000 yen at one point in my emails.
It has changed a little, but same basic location and layout, it is 1760 and 1210 now.
The East Orange in Toyohashi in 2004
The East Orange in Toyohashi in 2026
Sitting on the floor playing guitar, or listening to music, or reading a book was something I did a lot of while in Toyohashi. Of course I did study Japanese and for the GMAT. I eventually got a desk and when I went home at Christmas to visit my grandfather who was worried he’d die while I was abroad, I brought back some miniatures and some paints. But there were definitely some lean times. My bank account is considerably better than it was in those days or even ten years ago. I don’t want to think how much was spent on whisky on this trip, but I actually was the least big spender, though I bought more than my share of drams.
Above are miniatures I painted while living in Toyohashi Japan, they are metal Nurgle Plaguebearers and Plague Marines. If you’re wondering what this is all about, I put together a webpage a long time ago.
Seibukan Bookstore
When I returned to Toyohashi over twenty years later, a lot had changed. I had no trouble finding where I used to work, it was right near the train station. The alley beside where I used to work of course had not moved, then on what I thought of as the main drag was the bookstore, which brought back a lot of memories.
I read a lot while I lived in Japan. I used to read a lot more. This was the only bookstore I knew of in Toyohashi that sold English books and magazines. I paid a premium for them. I read the books previous teachers had left behind those included “The Wandering Bus” and “Snow Falling on Cedars”. There might have been other books left behind, but they obviously weren’t as memorable. Whenever I went to Tokyo I would alway buy more books and magazine. I shipped my books home from Japan, China, and Scotland. I never did that in Ottawa.
Back in the day, there were always men standing outside reading very specific magazines. That must now be frowned upon, not that those magazines don’t still exist, but I wouldn’t have had the foresight to take a photo if there were not men always reading magazines in front of Seibukan. Standing and reading is a very Japanese thing to do, or it was back in the day.
More Toyohashi
Although the original blog post I found about Toyohashi was difficult to relocate, I did try to find more about Toyohashi than I knew before. Eventually I found a YouTuber who lives in Toyohashi and likes ramen. His videos will be auto-translated to English if you watch them on YouTube.com, he does all sorts of things in Japan and makes videos about his travels and activities.
The school I worked at is long gone but the building remains. The alley with the izakaya was still there as was the bookstore and maybe the McDonald’s was there in 2004, but after that a lot has changed. Toyohashi has a bigger expat community now I’m lead to believe and it always had Brazilians and Filipinos. It is too bad I lost touch with so many people, but after a while I got tired of being the one expending all the effort to stay in touch.
Apparently you can just walk around filming and upload it to the Internet. This guy took almost the exact route as me when I arrived in Toyohashi after twenty two years, except I never went down the alley. In fact I don’t even remember going past the izakaya we always went to. He too does not walk quite as far as my old apartment, but I never actually watched until the end of the video.
Memory prices must have come down a lot in the last twenty-two years. I can’t even find a few seconds of video I took from back then, which would have likely been grainy and a couple hundred pixels wide. I remember buying a memory card in the jungle’s of Cambodia so I could take more photos. I bought one in China too which famously died taking all the pictures on it to Silicon Heaven. Those old memory cards may be at my mom’s or perhaps they are in a storage bin in my bedroom, assuming they can still be accessed, the video must have been on my Mac at some point but now it is just gone.
I scoured the Internet, as I didn’t recall there being a covered shopping street or Shotengai in Toyohashi. It doesn’t look impressive as because everything is closed on Wednesday or at least in the morning. I think the guy doing the walking video gets there eventually. If you know when this street right next to the Seibukan was built leave a comment, I honestly don’t remember it and I went down the street with the Seibukan hundreds of times.
If you just go by the Internet there seem to be more bars in Toyohashi than I remembered, but there were probably always lots, I was just poor and stuck to the same one or two spots between work and my apartment, even when someone else planned an outing it was usually nearby and on our side of the train station.
Bars and Restaurants
There are a lot of bars and restaurants around the station. I am not sure of the name of the restaurant we went to, but we sat on the floor and cooked what I’m confident was internal organs and intestines, which would not have been my first choice. Then afterward we went to his friend’s bar which is BUZZLE BUNCH.
Not sure I want to know exactly what I ate, but I have a suspicion.
The East Orange was closed as it was the owners day off. I don’t think either of these places is the most popular or famous in Toyohashi. But a band I had actually heard of was set to play the BUZZLE BUNCH soon. Banana Needle was shown to me by the algorithm. It features a female keyboardist/Hammond Organ player. There are a lot of Japanese bands with women members or even all women bands. Boris of course has Wata, but I don’t think I follow them on Instagram but I do follow @ChieGretsch aka Chie Horiguchi and there were two Western Orange Gretsch 6120s on the wall of the BUZZLE BUNCH.
Apparently there is a craft brewery in Toyohashi now called TOYS. I really should have researched more, but I just didn’t have time due to professional development taking up all my free time. There is apparently a great website on craft beer tourism in Japan now. There wasn’t much craft beer in Japan in 2003, another missed business opportunity I suppose. I think if I did a beer tour it would be to Belgium.
Toyohashi also apparently has a famous whisky bar. I learned this from Stamford who is @Japan_Whisky_Tours on the ‘Gram. It is called Gemor and may have been open when I lived there, but like a lot of places in Japan it is small and flew under the radar for a while, but now people seek it out. It specializes in American bourbon.
Ramen Shops
I spent a lot of time trying ramen when I lived in Toyohashi. I didn’t even know the name of some of the places I liked to eat at, it was harder being a foreigner in Japan before the World Cup and smart phones. Not only are some of the ramen shops I visited like Momoyama and Jandara still open in Toyohashi, perhaps the most infamous one survives. It is apparently called Kuroda-ya. I didn’t even know the name back in the day, I just found it by this sign.
They serve spicy Tonkotsu broth which is made from up to 500 kg of pork bones per day. Now having found this video and learned so much more about Toyohashi, I regret not having taken more time to research things prior to traveling. But my trip back to Toyohashi was a bit impulsive, and my time was limited however it would have been nice to have visited Kuroda-ya or a few other spots I documented. One day in Toyohashi clearly wasn’t enough time, especially as it was only a partial day and a Wednesday at that. Lots of things in Toyohashi are closed on Wednesday, including Kuroda-ya which apparently is also closed Tuesday.
YouTube and the auto-translation feature which is likely part of the Google translate app really does help when traveling, I never knew the name of this restaurant even though I ate there on many, many weekends will living in Toyohashi. I even learned the Chinese characters, 黒田屋. So I’ll see if I can scare up a webpage or Instagram account, but honestly I did not expect to find a YouTube video about an obscure ramen shop I last visited over twenty years ago.
More Pictures from my time in Toyohashi
I probably always ment to post more pictures to the Internet, especially as I also pay for Flickr and have done so for years, I just never got around to it. Most of these pictures have never been seen by another human being and I probably forgot I took some of them. But before I left Toyohashi I did bike around taking pictures of places that were important to me. I wish I had some more photos of the streets near my apartment or perhaps of the basketball gym we played in, but I did document all my favourite ramen shops, some which are still open. However, back in those days, I never thought to take pictures of the actual bowls of ramen, I was more concerned with helping people find the shops without smart phones and Google Maps which just did not exist.
This blog post went through many edits, but if you have any further thoughts on Toyohashi you can leave them below. After eating and drinking and walking around taking photos I travelled to Tokyo for one last reunion before returning to Canada.
]]>The Most Ancient Capital
Kyoto is more famous and has the maybe the most Unesco heritage sites per square meter of anywhere in the world, but apparently it has gotten very popular with tourists. As mentioned when planning this trip, I thought Kyoto was pretty popular twenty plus years ago, but apparently it is even more popular now, so Nara was definitely chill. It is literally famous for nearly tame dear that are considered sacred so 1300 plus of them wander all around the parks, shrines and temples.
Nara as mentioned is not on the Shinkansen train line so most people seem to do a day trip to Nara from either Kyoto or Osaka. Two train lines do converge on Nara and even if you agree to meet at a specific gate you should specify above or below ground. I almost couldn’t find my guide Kazuna because of this. Luckily we both waited and through the magic of email and direct messages on Instagram we were able to set out to tour the temples and shrines of Nara but not the Pagoda. It is apparently closed for repairs for years, so I’ve been invited to comeback to Nara for another tour.
Shrines, Temples, and Pagodas
It has been over twenty years since I’ve been to Kyoto, but based on my recollection of the train station and of course some photos, Kyoto is indeed bigger than Nara, but as the Imperial Capital before Nara the shrines, temples and pagodas are in theory older. I say in theory because most of these major wooden structures have burnt down. And each time they rebuild they are usually smaller and they have trouble sourcing the large timbers so they have to alter the plans slightly.
In the latest version of the biggest building only two of the temple guardians were built in their entirety. It seems getting funding is hard. This jives with other places I’ve been, it took them hundreds years to build St. Magnus in Kirkwall Scotland. Nara is a lot bigger than Kirkwall, but for reasons unknown Orkney has been occupied by human settlements going back 1000s of years, so any buildings from way back in the day likely have gone through some wear and tear if not full reconstruction and we should be happy we can tour them at all.
Once again I bought a copy of the Lonely Planet Japan. I think I’ve bought at least three over the years. The latest one I left in my last hotel room in Tokyo, hopefully it finds a good home. It was in the Lonely Planet I learned you can get a free tour guide for Nara, so of course I signed up for that. We met at approximately 9 AM at a train station near the Park. Then we went to three of the most famous buildings and basically walked by the pagoda which was encased in something that looked like a giant grain elevator.
Photos
It was also in Nara where I discovered my Panasonic DMC-GM1 wasn’t working quite right, immediately before my tour with Kazuna. So almost every photo on this blog was taken with an iPhone 13 Mini. I didn’t look at getting it repaired or replacing the lens in Nara or Tokyo, but I felt dumb carrying it all over Japan without using it much, but it is very small and everyone wants the immediacy of smartphones and social media. The plan is to visit the Camera Store again and buy a new lens, but having just spent a record amount of money in a short period of time, I think I can hold off buying a new camera lens for a month or two.
Better Blogs
Although my blog is old, there are better travel blogs out there. Nara for me was really chill. We saw what we could, had lunch, then saw one more shrine and a famous author’s house. I took a lot of photos which seems to be what most people on the internet want or maybe a short video. This trip I did not do as exhaustive planning as I have done in the past, so I keep linking to other travel blogs to extoll the virtues of a destination, in this case Nara. For me Nara was really good, I took a nap both afternoons. Other people may have crammed in more than me:
- Tessa spent two days in Nara
- Apparently you can do Nara with kids
- Like everywhere in Japan, Nara is busy during Golden Week
- One last Nara travelog
Nara is Easy and Chill
As other bloggers can confirm above, Nara is easy. Although it is not on the Shinkansen, it is about an hour by train from cities which are. Nara is smaller than Kyoto, Osaka and Fukuoka, so you can walk most everywhere in a morning or an afternoon. There are of course buses, trains, and cabs you can take as well. It is an extremely tourist friendly place to visit and very photogenic even if you are not obsessed with deer. There are maps and signs everywhere and you’ll see they are in Japanese, Chinese, Korean and English, this is true on many trains as well. The website Japan Guide has a great list of the most popular sites in Nara and elsewhere in Japan, I should have consulted it more perhaps when planning this trip.
The above treat was from Good Knight Ice which may or may not have a website, but is likely on the ‘Gram. This was near my hotel which was easy enough to find and walkable from either train station. Pictures of food are also popular online especially of Japanese food. I told Kazuna that one of the things that makes Japan great were the cafes and book shops. I’m not sure what was the name of the cafe she chose, it was down some alleys but still near Nara Park and everything tourists will visit. Good Knight Ice will be even easier to find for most people.
Craft Beer
I don’t think Nara is famous for craft beer, but I found two establishments fairly easy and they both seem to be part of the same chain or brewery, so having just finished my exhaustive whisky tour of Southern Japan of course I went out both nights and had a beer or two. Last call was at 9pm maybe even earlier so that tells you a lot of how Nara is as opposed to Kyoto let alone Osaka or Fukuoka nightlife.
Onward to Toyohashi
At least twice I had to explain that Toyohashi is in Aichi prefecture. It is not a famous city and not a popular tourist destination, but I did live there for a year teaching English so since if you draw a line between Fukuoka and Tokyo you come close to Nara and Toyohashi, I decided after twenty years this might be my last best time to visit again. The only person who seems to still live there and remembered me was a bartender.
If you have questions or comments about Nara you can leave them below, I’ll do my best to answer.
]]>An entire post will eventually be written about the various whisky distilleries I toured in Japan. I had previously toured distilleries and breweries in Japan, Scotland, and of course Canada, but distilleries seem to try really hard to differentiate themselves so although we toured nine they were all different some didn’t even make whisky yet…
Although I’d lived and traveled in Japan before including visiting when I was in high school in the 90s I’d never been to Kyushu. Of course I’d been to Honshu and I’d twice visited Hokkaido, plus I visited a friend who living in Shikoku so this trip crossed off the final major island in Japan. Before going I really did wonder if this would be my last trip to Japan, but seeing how popular it is with relatives, coworkers and friends maybe I visit again in ten or twelve years to you know, see how the whisky aged.
Kagoshima
Kagoshima is pretty amazing, I wish I had taken the time to explore it more. There is an actual volcano in the harbour which we never climbed, there is of course a famous shrine on that island. The city is also famous for both samurai and the Meji restoration. I didn’t go to that museum either though some in our tour group did. What we did use Kagoshima for was as a base to explore the Southern tip of Kyushu.
So although I may not have done all the A-List attractions I do have a bunch of pictures and did buy a fridge magnet and of course some whisky for my friend Bill.
Kumamoto
Kumamoto is the city that gave us Kumamon. He is so famous I kept forgetting the name of the actual city. This was possibly the nicest hotel we stayed at. Maybe we stayed at other nicer hotels, both the ones I stayed at in Tokyo were nice and the ones I chose in Nara and Toyohashi were super convenient, but this hotel room I was assigned was huge. I had a corner room and a city view. It is too bad I didn’t have this view in Kagoshima though I have plenty of pictures of the volcano as we drove around.
There was an entire store devoted to Kumamon but once again I never walked around that much. Our days were packed and our nights generally involved a group dinner and a visit to a whisky bar. Kagoshima and Kumamoto have less famous bars than Tokyo or Fukuoka or Chichibu. It is hard to say where we got the best food or the best whisky, but there is absolutely no doubt which city has the most famous mascot. I should have bought a plushy or some more nicknacks as apparently they would have been in demand, more so than whisky and biscuits which I brought back as omiyage.
Kumamoto is also the home of the artist behind One Piece so you see anime stuff all over Japan but One Piece dominates this particular train station.
Fukuoka
Although I was most looking forward to Kagoshima and Kumamon is impossible to forget, the city the surprised me the most was Fukuoka. It is bigger than I thought it would be for one, it had a big bar district. For someone who lived in Japan for a year, I never spent a lot of time in the bar districts. I did visit Roppongi and of course drank in Sapporo and Kyoto, however I was a poor English teacher saving for grad school. This trip I was considerably less poor and with a bunch of people who planned to drink most every night they were in Japan.
This is also the city where we briefly got lost. I of course insisted we were heading away from the train station and thus our hotel. But apparently the phone and map we were following was directing us away from Hakata station. Eventually we asked a third party and he indeed took us back to a major road and pointed to the train station, but we were on the wrong side of it. This cabbie had taken us not where we wanted to go. In everyone’s defence there were three Forza hotels around Hakata station, we were in one on the East side, how I remembered it was the Hub pub and eventually I put a pin in the map for our hotel, but it wasn’t me who ordered the cab. This turned into an extra late night as we walked around Fukuoka trying to find the exact Forza hotel we were staying at.
Fukuoka was also where we said our goodbyes. Some people travelled on to Hiroshima, some to Kyoto, some back to America via Tokyo and me I travelled on alone to Nara, Toyohashi, and before going back to Tokyo and flying back to Calgary.
Fukuoka is apparently famous for ramen, but I’m not sure I got a bowl, certainly not at anywhere famous. We did go for ramen in Chichibu and I got a bowl in the airport but we ate a variety of Japanese food rather than sticking to the sensible all ramen diet. I’ve been to Ippudo before, I documented ramen shops in Shanghai extensively. We did apparently have ramen in Kagashima. We twice tried to get into the izakya pictured above, but our group was too big at seven people. Some bars and restaurants in Japan, especially rural Japan are very small indeed.
Rural Kyushu
When travelling around Kyushu we used first Kagoshima, then Kumamoto, and finally Fukuoka as an our base. Somedays we had a driver in a “jumbo taxi”, some days we took a train, or even a series of trains to get to a more remote location. Cabs were definitely taken on one particular day and were often used at night to get back to our hotel, famously not working out perfectly at least once. We also used Ubers for this purpose and of course trams. I even recall walking to one brew pub by myself after spending time doing the laundry in Kagoshima. Suffice to say a lot of smaller towns and villages were passed through and maybe I should have taken more exhaustive notes, but I did not keep a journal nor lug a laptop around with me this trip.
Smartphone metadata often knows where a photo was taken so as I scatter images around this post and the whisky distillery touring post more rural areas in Kyushu will appear as we spent a lot of time travelling not just hanging out in Kagoshima, Kumamoto, and Fukuoka drinking, eating, and shopping. I famously did the least shopping and I tried to buy something at most every distillery we visited and of course got omiyage including many fridge magnets.
Reading Material
When I travel I try to read novels or books by local authors. When I visited Scotland I read Irvine Welsh, as I travelled all over China I read various authors and books on China. When I was taking trains in Germany specifically from Bavaria to Bohemia I read Candide and Nietzsche so as part of my planning for a return to Japan I ordered the latest book by Murakami, Ryu Murakami.
In “From the Fatherland, with Love” the North Koreans invade Japan, specifically Fukuoka. On my flight to Tokyo I did not read much, nor did I read much on our first couple train rides and there is always your smartphone to waste time on, but as the trip went on I read this book more. I didn’t even go out drinking one night in Fukuoka and instead did the laundry and read this book. I never managed to finish it before I got home, but I learned a lot about Fukuoka geography from a book about it being invaded, alas I learned most of this after we left and already gotten lost.
Onward to Nara
A coworker who may eventually read this suggested I go to Nara as I’d never been. I of course visited Kyoto along with Himeji when I lived in Japan back in 2004. However I’d never been to Nara. I really wanted to visit Matsumoto castle but it just wasn’t convenient. It would have been more convenient to visit Nagoya castle which somehow I’ve never toured even though I’ve visited Nagoya many times. I even looked at flying home from that airport. In the end to I decided to spend two nights in Nara which I documented next.
Feel free to leave any comments or questions you have about Kyushu, I’m far from a Kyushu expert but it was definitely nice.
]]>If you did not read the planning post you may want to. Planning was not as extensive as for my trip to Scotland but you may notice a similar pattern where I join a larger group for part of my trip. I’d previously visited Tokyo in the 90s, a picture of that trip I dug up from old photo albums, because in the 1990s people did not have digital cameras. However in the early 2000s, when I lived in Japan, I did have a Nikon CoolPix 2500 so I have some digital photos from that time. However in 2004, there was barely any blogosphere. There was however Muschamp.ca so I do have old stories, proto-blog posts if you will which I can reference or steal images from.
In 2016, I did visit Japan. However, I just passed through Tokyo Airport, probably Narita, and although I did enjoy some Ramen, my ultimate destination was Hokkaido which I’ve now visited twice. Suffice to say I’ve have traveled to Japan multiple times over multiple decades and maybe I have some insight. Or perhaps I’m just exhausted as I still have not heard the results of the last certification course I did, but was encouraged enough to take yet another one by the experience.
Joining A Group Tour
The majority of my time in Japan this time was spent with Charles from Rascal + Thorn. He has an Instagram and I’ll try embed some of his posts as he made one most days we travelled, though some of them may have been those that expire after 24 hours. I followed him and he recognized me at the hotel restaurant the morning after I arrived in Japan, apparently I have a cool Instagram. Our tour was not supposed to start until Friday March 6th, but everyone on the tour arrived in Japan earlier and most of us stayed at the Shiba Park Hotel, which was maybe the most expensive hotel I booked while in Japan.
Charles’s Day 3 would have been technically my Day 2 in Japan, but upon arrival in Japan I paid for a very expensive cab to the hotel then basically went to bed, but the next day we did do some sightseeing and of course we went drinking as you can see above. We actually went to two whisky bars, Milwaukee which was not made famous by whisky and Aloha.
There will be an entire post dedicated to drinking and touring distilleries to be written later, but I wanted to test including Charle’s almost real time account of our travels and the first thing I could find which if you watched has my picture is our account of visiting Milwaukee’s which specialized in bourbon, despite being named after a city in Wisconsin not Kentucky.
Japanese Public Transit
I dubbed this section “Japanese Public Transit” but a lot of the train lines are actually private enterprises and are often owned by shopping centres. So the train will run from a smaller city or suburb and stop at a shopping complex for your convenience. Since I left Japan even more trains and stops have likely been added especially in Tokyo, which I believe has the largest or perhaps busiest metro system in the world. It is pretty amazing. I’m more of an expert in Shanghai’s metro having lived there for four years, but the great thing about Japan, especially post World Cup and after the invention of the smart phone is how easy it is to navigate.
I didn’t plan to write a Shanghai versus Tokyo blog post. But as a former resident of Shanghai, yeah I’m voting Tokyo, maybe if my Chinese was better, but Tokyo just seems more fun. Tokyo of course has amazing food and shopping. But as I told my tour guide in Nara, why I like Japan over China is basically what they value and one thing Japan values is reading, they have the best bookstores in Asia. I used to read a lot and still want to read more, so book stores, cafes, and by extension record stores and pubs is how I judge a place I visit.
For example, Inverness has a great book store, plenty of pubs, even if you think it is a bit touristy, it is almost a must visit if you go to the Scottish Highlands even if just for connections. Northern Scotland is a lot less populous and takes a lot more careful planning to navigate solo than Japan, which seems to have another train whereever you want to go in 15 minutes.
Never have I taken the Shinkansen so much. When I lived in Japan I was a poor English teacher so going to Tokyo by Shinkansen was a big deal and often I chose to take say the Meitetsu line or some other slower cheaper line than pay for the Shinkansen. This time in Japan I tended to choose fast and easy and while we were a group we stuck together through many trains, buses, and subways. The consensus opinion was the Shinkansen was great but some people did Uber a lot or we would take what was known as “jumbo taxies” basically vans when we were traveling as a group.
If you are traveling by yourself, which I did for part of this trip and have done many times, public transit or the cheap trains are indeed cheap and easy during the day time. I successfully bought many train and subway tickets, most machines will do English and most trains will call out the stops in English. This wasn’t the case twenty plus years ago, you had to learn some kanji and pay much more attention to what stop you needed to get off at. Now most stations have staff that can speak English or they will use their smart phone to get you safely on your way if you are lost and confused.
Tokyo’s Many Districts
I once stayed in Gotanda. That is not a famous district in Tokyo. My first hotel in Tokyo was in Minato this is quite close to Tokyo Tower a landmark I’d never visited before. I don’t think I’d ever even visited this district but it is obviously more famous than Gotanda, which I may not even have photos of.
Although I did pass through many train and subway stations, probably not as many as I did back in the day. We also had a small group and quite a bit of luggage so although I travel light and had literally the same backpack I had last time, others in our group gradually acquired more and more luggage so I and especially Charles had to lend a hand, but everyone got everywhere safely and I believe a good time was had by all, so now that I’ve spoiled the ending you don’t have to read any further.
Shibuya vs Shinjuku
Shibuya may be my favourite district in Tokyo, but for some reason I stayed in Shinjuku. I’m not sure I would still know Shibuya but it was tradition to meet friends, especially Yoshiko at a very specific statue. Ginza was always too rich for my blood, but I always hear the food is great. I did not visit that district this time, most districts besides Minato and Shinjuku I just passed through or completely didn’t visit this trip, which is why this may not be my last trip to Tokyo or Japan.
teamLab Borderless
This is another thing besides Tokyo Tower that Charles had planned to do the day he found me, so of course I went. It was definitely cool and you can walk around the place for hours taking videos and photos. I definitely took some pictures and video but here is someone else’s review of teamLab Borderless they placed on YouTube.
Reunions
Although I seem to have lost touch with Yoshiko once again. I did have something of a reunion in Tokyo with someone I met twenty plus years before. People were definitely surprised I came back to Japan after twenty years, but they forget I did visit in 2016 and they maybe were not aware of all the difficulties I’ve gone through since 2004.
I wonder if this picture has a weird filter on it, because I didn’t take it. This was at a little izakaya in Shinjuku. I am a big fan or little izakayas and Saya picked this one out of all the places in Tokyo or at least in Shinjuku.
Onward to Chichibu
Japanese geography experts will note that Chichibu is not in Tokyo, it is actually in Saitama prefecture. Nonetheless our group had to meet in Tokyo to travel to Chichibu, this was a lot of logistics. Some of us met a day or two before as documented above, but then the full group assembled and travelled to Chichibu. Afterwards we both had to get back to Tokyo then get to Haneda Airport so we could fly South. The purpose of visiting Chichibu was of course whisky but we did see a nice shrine, which may actually host a whisky festival. Whisky has become synonymous with Chichibu but it also famous for hiking and of course visiting temples.
There are many, many temples and shrines in Japan and we visited a famous one in Minato which I’ll have to included photos of. We actually visited multiple shrines, we got in a lot of steps in Tokyo, but we also ate gyoza and of course had to seek out a couple whisky bars for the ‘Gram. I took over 1000 photos with my iPhone on this trip, the best of them will end up on Flickr in this album, which includes photos I’ve taken in Japan over the last twenty or so years.
I used to also “pin” images from my blog to a board on Pinterest, but lately Pinterest doesn’t seem to want to let me, I think they want even larger images, whereas I pay all my hosting costs and make zero dollars off this blog, so you’ll just have to pin my images for me from Flickr perhaps.
Then we finally went to Kyushu
When I signed up for this tour, one of the reasons I did so is I’d never been to Chichibu but most of our time was actually spent in Kyushu which I’d also never visited. So after our quick jaunt to Chichibu we flew to Kagoshima and that is where the blog series will resume. If you have questions about Tokyo or actually think Shanghai is better you can leave a comment below.
]]>Why Japan?
I liked Japan before it was cool. Actually Japan has probably been cool for longer than that, but I was always into ninjas and samurais when I was a kid. I travelled to Japan on exchange back in the 90s and studied Japanese back in high school and university. I really should have been studying Japanese the last six months instead of Python for Finance.
Why Now?
Now it seems like everyone is travelling to Japan and by everyone I mean lots of people I work with. It is probably more people than that even. I know Trump has made traveling to the United States particularly unpopular, then there was an extrajudicial killing of a crime lord in Mexico the other day and now apparently he’s launching missiles at Iran so yeah visiting Japan seems like a safe and easy choice for my tourist dollars instead of say Kentucky, Mexico, or Dubai.
Why Whisky?
The first whisky distillery I ever visited was in Japan. Since then I’ve travelled to Scotland visiting ten distilleries there plus I’ve visited several in Canada. I even have successfully become the whisky guy at work. I am now expected to organize a Robbie Burns whisky tasting again next year. Hopefully that gets easier, we hired an actual rugby playing Scotsman now, so I may have a coconspirator.
As I said after organizing the last one, it is hard to have a bad time at a whisky tasting. And people who opt into taking a tour of multiple whisky distilleries are probably likeminded individuals and not looking to talk about Trump, but I think it is going to be hard to not talk about Trump at some point as this tour group is likely a bunch of Americans. I’ll pack my New Jersey Devils hockey jersey and probably a Canadian Rugby jersey. I’ll be easy to spot in the photos that way.
Most of the planning I did was trying to find a tour to join. The first two websites I found, one guy never replied and the second guy seemed to expect me to bring him an entire group of people to guide. I probably told this part of the story before, but it wasn’t hard to choose Rascal + Thorn. I kept my plans on the down low and have really been focussing on work and professional development, but select coworkers know what I’m doing and they as always are more excited than me. I’m exhausted as I’ve already blogged today.
Where will I visit?
That is actually the purpose of this post. After booking the main tour, I eventually booked my flights and some shoulder hotels and even one more day tour in Nara. I’ve typed it up in Excel and I also got a PDF detailing the itinerary from Charles Grabitzky here are some of the highlights of my trip:
- Tokyo coming
- Chichibu
- Chichibu Distillery
- Highlander Inn
- Kagoshima
- Whisky Bar BB13
- Mars Tsunuki Distillery
- Kanosuke Distillery
- Hinokami Distillery
- Akayane Gin Distillery
- Kumamoto
- Ontake Distillery
- Fukano Distillery
- Rokuchoshi Shochu
- Fukuoka
- Ishikiura Sake Brewery
- Kuju Distillery
- Hikari Distillery
- Nara
- Toyohashi
- Tokyo going
Who knew there were so many distilleries in Japan. We are also going to sample gin, shochu, and sake. It is a gastronomic tour but I’m sure we’ll see some shrines and temples. They have a lot of shrines and temples in Japan. I got some twenty year old photos of my previous travels to Japan and uploaded them to the Internet for the first time ever lest there are not enough pictures of shrines and temples in Japan online.
Why Toyohashi?
As mentioned somewhere, I used to live and teach English in Toyohashi. I don’t actually have that many photos of the town. Never thought to take them, memory cards were expensive back in the day, but I did take pictures of my favourite ramen shops. I also liked ramen before it was cool. So hopefully we have some ramen on this trip. Most people I knew from back then either haven’t kept in touch, though obviously some of that is my fault, or the Sauder School of Business’s. Regardless of who is to blame I may only see one person I know in Tokyo and one person I know in Toyohashi.
The guy in Toyohashi does own a bar, so maybe I should bring him some whisky. I haven’t bought any omiyage. I’ve been so busy. I did go to one shop yesterday but they didn’t have what I wanted. I’m actually tempted to go to Stephan Ave and get some nicknacks tomorrow but I can always get them at Calgary Airport, not sure which will be cheaper. I actually have a lot of time before I fly on Tuesday, so I can do some things last minute.
Toyohashi isn’t that famous but it does have local festivals. I just missed the Demon Festival. But I went over twenty years ago, it was probably cool before that though.
Where to next?
When I was planning my trip to Scotland I bought a guide book for Belgium too, but decided against any sort of grand European tour at that time. My next vacation might be some place quiet and easy, but I do like Belgian beer. I think it is time I open a beer to improve the quality of this blog posting, the one I chose is called Very Big Moose.
You know how you write long blog posts, one word at a time. I didn’t think I’d write this much, but I’m practically in vacation mode, alas I do have to work tomorrow. However, my return flight lands on a Friday so I’ll have a whole weekend to recover from this trip. I’ll probably write one post about each of the major places I visit, though I may bunch some places together like I did for my trip to Scotland. I’ll also probably write about the distillery tours in some depth but I’m not much for tasting notes. I just know what I like.
I’m not sure how many changes of clothing I can bring. I think I’m using the same backpack I had twenty years ago, I saw it in some of the old photos. I took it to Scotland, China, Thailand, The Philippines, even Cambodia. I’ll have to see about getting a Japanese patch this time. I’m going to take some patches off to make a battle vest. Eventually, I’ll have to do laundry, possibly late at night on the side of the street, something I have a vivid memory of doing while travelling in Japan. By the quality of the photo, I took this picture on my keitai.
Another photo I thought to take but has likely never been posted to the Internet ever is the “wall of me” I built in my classroom. We were encouraged to decorate our classrooms, so I got my mom to send me a Canadian flag which I left for the next guy as he too was Canadian, but I saved most of the articles and nicknacks I posted on this wall. I spent a lot of money on magazines and books while I lived in Japan. My mom probably sent me some of the newspaper clippings and postcards. Note the Bloodshot Records sticker, I may have specialty ordered some albums to Japan too, I know I did while I lived in China.
I could really do something cool with this photo now. It would probably make a good desktop background though it is only 1600 by 1200 pixels because it was taken on a Nikon CoolPix 2500, my first ever digital camera. Note also the Maker’s Mark ad, that was the brand of whisky I likely drank at the East Orange, I even had my own bottle on the shelf eventually. I never did turn fully Japanese, likely left too early and should have gone back either for my exchange semester or likely sooner than now. Though I did meet a friend in Sapporo in 2016 so almost ten years ago I last visited Japan. That is when we visited Yoichi distillery.
If you have thoughts or questions you can leave a comment below, at least until the spammers get so bad and I lock the comment section. Now back in Canada I wrote the next in what will be a series of seven blog posts, the first stop on this tour of Japan was of course Tokyo.
]]>Professional Development
I spend very little time looking at Google Analytics these days and I never did much profiling of my meagre readership, but I doubt the people who come to read these year-end wrap-up posts want to hear about professional development, but considering how much time I sunk into it in 2025, that is where I’m starting. I did manage to finish the CFA® Institutes’s Data Science for Investment Professionals certificate but it didn’t really change a thing, so I started the other certificate that I’m on the mailing list for. That one is going to take another month or two of weekends to complete, but once I have the Certificate in Python for Finance I may have to initiate some change.
Hopefully you can hear the embedded playlist because if you read the entire post, you’ll learn it remains a struggle to embed YouTube videos in my blog.
Fitness
My fitness is not what it was ten years ago. However I still go to the gym, but you’d be hard pressed to know that. Moving to Calgary hasn’t been the greatest for my health, COVID-19 threw me off my routine and fitness once lost is tough to regain especially now that I’m ten years older. However just like Apple Music and Flickr, I do pay for a fitness app and Jefit sent me this summary so I thought I would add it, as improving my fitness is definitely a goal in 2026.
Apple Music
Although I think only people who subscribe to Apple Music can hear the entire playlist or the entirety of each song, I literally spend all year cultivating playlists on Apple Music. This Replay 2025 one is automatically generated. It isn’t 100% accurate as I think Apple only promotes songs they have the rights to whereas I can listen to music I own that I may have gotten from another source than Apple such as Bandcamp.
Officially, the artist I listened to the most was the Dreadnoughts who I actually saw play in Calgary with the Real MacKenzies in 2025. I was deemed to be one of their 500 biggest fans at least on Apple Music. I was also among the top 500 fans of Left Lane Cruiser and Joshua Ray Walker. I only managed to make the top 1000 for Murder By Death but this was one of the biggest years of their career as they decided this would be their last major tour ever, which I of course caught in Toronto.
I’ll include one video for each of those artists later in the blog post. If you look at my replay you’ll see as the year came to an end I was big into the Heavy Eyes, so I’ll include one of their songs below as well, as they did not make the official playlist.
Blogging
2025 actually marked the twentieth year I’ve been maintaining this WordPress blog. I never thought I’d make it this far, but I’ll try to hang on for another five years, get to a quarter of a century. Most of my blogging took place in the few weeks between when I finished the first professional development certificate and started the second one. I still have not finished redoing my blog taxonomy, that will be a priority when I finally finish the Certificate in Python for Finance.
The trend in the blogosphere, is people abandoning it, they stop posting, they stop commenting and they stop following people’s RSS feeds. The other trend is towards longer posts. AI is also being used to crank out what people have dubbed “slop”. No AI has been used on Muschamp.ca, though technically I’m studying it, because we want to leverage it more at work. The ChatGPTs of the world can only regurgitate and summarize, they can’t access all of human knowledge and they’re trained mainly on that paragon of virtue, reddit. AI can also not have an opinion on what songs or artists they like and what art resonates with them. AI also can’t paint miniatures as well as a human either, so assuming I survive, I’ll blog more about my hobbies and personal interests going forward and leave the regurgitation to the slop spammers.
Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest etc.
I think I posted once, maybe twice to Instagram all year. This reflects how many miniatures I painted in 2025 which was zero. I also think I played zero Games Workshop games. I did play some Sid Meier’s Civilization VII in my few weeks off between professional development certificates. This is why I’m really reluctant to commit to another program that takes six months to three years. There are professional development courses you can complete in a manner of weeks, but I doubt they add much to my resume or my career at this point. I’m tempted to study Japanese or just guitar, I finally bought a new guitar in 2025.
I don’t think I pinned a thing, that website has changed and miniature painters seem to use Instagram as do fitness influencers and musicians etc. Twitter which I apparently refuse to call “X” is the social network I still use the most, but I refuse to pay to get analytics, so you’ll just have to take my word for it. Twitter is useful for breaking news, including in the world of sports, but it is also used extensively in tech and finance so I need to maintain an account for professional reasons, but many people have quite it entirely since it was taken over by Elon Musk, It has definitely changed, I do not like the inline blog posts masquerading as tweets, but I still check it multiple times per day.
Flickr
I do pay for Flickr, but you wouldn’t know that by how much I post. I think I posted a few dozen pictures at most in 2025. I do take pictures on my iPhone and share them in chats mainly, but in 2026 if I return to travelling and painting miniatures I’ll add a lot more pictures to the Internet. I haven’t had the time or energy to upload pictures, categorize them, or tag them. Sorting them takes time and I don’t even do any post production. My Flickr analytics are not very interesting, the same photo remains the most popular.
Miniature Painting
As mentioned above zero miniatures were painted and zero games played in 2025. Maintaining a blog keeps you honest about things like hobby goals or professional development. Here are some of my miniatures posted to Flickr.
One of these days I need to figure out a fix to my WordPress theme to handle custom HTML embeds better, of course if I never used them, this problem would just go away. Part of the problem seems to be the fact I use a much bigger monitor than I used to use on smaller screens which most people use, I think this post looks better.
Travel
As I did not leave Canada, it seems I barely travelled and I did not even make the minimum number of suggested days off until the final month of the year, when I made a DIY long weekend which I think I spent doing professional development. All that said, I did travel to Toronto for the first time in my life, that is a blog post I already linked to above. I made two trips back to British Columbia and my mother and sister again came to Alberta which is when we went to Drumheller, so I can share a few more pictures I put on Flickr.
As you should well know, blogging is thirsty work.
Beer & Whisky
As you may have guessed a lot of beer was consumed in 2025, something I’m going to have to cut down on, but after my tour of Japanese whisky distilleries obviously. Untappd did a year-end roundup but I cannot seem to embed it. My fitness app did one too, but I didn’t get to the gym as much as I would have liked, though I did make it over 100 times.
My favourite beer in Alberta remains Hefe, so I really should get out to the Turner Valley again, this time when the Fahr brewery is open. I also worked hard to make the Ship & Anchor my local. As for whisky I don’t log it, but I did have people over in December for some tastings and I’ll be attending and hosting a few more in 2026 obviously.
I also unexpectedly toured a whisky distillery in December, the Shelter Point distillery has long been near my sister’s house so we went for a tour and a tasting. I’ve now toured over a dozen whisky distilleries in three different countries, I’ll have to get to Kentucky and Ireland someday and of course back to Scotland.
Books
I should have finished another book last year, as it was I did not reach my goal, but I watched a lot of online videos for professional development and read numerous PDFs. The book I just finished is by Rob Miller the co-founder of Bloodshot Records, so it was great reliving some of the 90s and early 2000s music scene, or at least the music scene Rob was involved in first in Detroit then more famously in Chicago. Travelling to the States to see gigs is definitely something I want to do, though I may just have to move to a city that gets more tours again as Calgary gets so few.
GoodReads is another niche online social network I’ve been using. My sister’s friend came to a conclusion that I must be in the top 1% users of Untappd, maybe in 2026 I’ll drink less and read more, but given how many writers were borderline if not outright alcoholics I doubt that. I got a nice cold Leffe Blonde going as I type this.
Centring every image is not the answer but neither is floating them all to the right. After twenty years I’ve come around to not doing anything with my images, just put them between the images and let the browsers to their best to render the webpage. Pixel by pixel accuracy was always a fools errand.
Gigs
I got to very few musical performances this year, but I did get asked to join a band, some people at work even assumed I was already in a band. Professional development isn’t conducive to going out late to music venues and my guitar playing ebbs and flows, but I’ve really been working on some weird right hand techniques including the not terribly weird Travis picking. As mentioned previously seeing the Dreadnoughts and Murder by Death was great, but I went to both shows alone, maybe in 2026 my friends and I can get our schedules to sync and we can see some summer tours. I will work on my battle vest.
YouTube Videos
Now I must pause Apple Music, which I’ve been listening to as I’ve been writing this and find five videos I can successfully embed one for each of my top 4 artists according to Apple Music and a bonus video of the Heavy Eyes. My new theory is I must publish the post to see if the videos can be embedded, why they won’t show up in the WordPress editor is a mystery.
The Dreadnoughts
This is what is so frustrating, I find a video, shot in the DTES where I worked in 2008, yet never crossed paths with this band and I can’t embed it. The whole video was shot within a few blocks of BOB’s office on Main and Hastings. It seems the embedded previews are not working and I must basically publish this blog post to see if the videos can in fact be embedded.
Left Lane Cruiser
Next up is Left Lane Cruiser, who I know I’ve embedded a video by before, maybe YouTube has decided to prevent most people from sharing videos, perhaps I need to sign some revenue sharing agreement, don’t they know this blog earns zero revenue, it is pure unadulterated cost.
Joshua Ray Walker
Joshua Ray Walker is another artist I discovered this year. Let me link to one of his videos too.
Murder By Death
I know I have embedded videos by Murder By Death and I know I’ve done it this year, but tonight I had to first link. Then when I published I decided to experiment more and finally got them all to work.
The Heavy Eyes
These guys are yet another recent discovery given to me by the algorithm. I had a video picked out for them of what is probably their best song “These Men Are Wolves” hopefully you don’t have to click through to listen, but if you do, then you do.
Next Year
I’ve already written about my biggest plans so far for 2026. I plan to finish the Certificate in Python for Finance and after that to travel back to Japan, including visiting Toyohashi where I lived over twenty years ago. 2026 is also my fiftieth year on the planet so there will be some celebrating. I also will likely have to make some big decisions as I’m tired of going around in circles and Calgary is cold and getting lonelier as I devote more and more time to professional development. If you have thoughts on the New Year, professional development or why I struggle to embed YouTube videos in my WordPress blog you can leave a comment below.
The very first couple posts have been deleted over the years. Actually a lot of posts have been deleted over the years. However there are still posts from September 2005 and I know I was living in Prince George British Columbia when I first installed WordPress. I was encouraged to start blogging by the Sauder School of Business or perhaps a guest speaker they brought in. I’m sure they’ve come to regret that advice. I’ve made peace with it, I think. Even in the last few months however, I was tempted to take my whole website down as I’d grown so frustrated with my web host.
Happy Blogiversary
This is not my first blogiversary post. In fact this domain has been online since 2002. As a result I celebrated 20 years of maintaining a hobby website and blogging about the hobby of miniature painting and miniature wargaming a few years back. That was a popular post in a very niche portion of the Blogosphere. I personally chose the best post or most representative content from each of the years my hobby website had been online.
Google Analytics I was forced to retire but Google Site Kit has risen to take its place. So although I don’t have as much data as I’d previously analyzed when choosing relatively popular blog posts, I do have data I can analyze. I came up with the idea of using the internal link structure of my blog, with one internal link being one vote. That was the fundamental insight Larry and Sergei originally had building Google. Using this methodology I was able to determine which blog post was the most popular from each of the twenty calendar years.
A picture is worth a thousand words
I’ve written too many words on this blog. This is why I can delete half of them and few people noticed. However, when doing my previous anniversary posts I was reminded of the importance images play in blogging. In the olden days bandwidth cost relatively more money, now you can get free image hosting and although I complained a lot about web hosting recently, given that I’m less popular, my images get stolen and hotlinked to less. I am not even sure my anti-hotlinking solution survived the change in web hosts, I haven’t tried to test it. I just don’t have the energy to always fight the good fight anymore.
However for both the retrospective on my miniature painting and my collection of the best travelogs I’ve posted I came to appreciate my collection of images more. I have plenty of smaller resolution images hosted on this domain. And I do load the featured images into WordPress itself but I have the original higher resolution images in Apple Photos going back to 2002 and I can put up higher resolution photos on Flicker, so that is what I’ve tended to do in recent years. As a result old posts can get new higher resolution images and for your blogiversary, it really helps to have had something photogenic to blog about.
Alas given I went with a mathematical methodology of selecting the next twenty blog posts they are not always as photogenic as miniature painting or traveling.
2005: Baidu China’s Search Engine
Although this blog was started in British Columbia, it was done so with an eye towards my upcoming exchange semester at Tsinghua University in Beijing. During that time, for my international business class I toured and interviewed staff at Baidu. This was my first blog post that became popular outside my circle of friends and acquaintances. That was about as viral as a visit to a Chinese Internet startup could go twenty-five years ago, but is nothing by today’s standards.
Google took down the old Google Analytics website. I exported my data, but now it would be more work to graph my website becoming less popular over time. I did find an old graph from Google Analytics showing traffic from November 16th 2005 to August 18th 2013. As to what is popular now or back then you’ll also just have to take my word. The post about visiting Baidu did get shared and read even though it predates Twitter and most every other social media network. After twenty years I am still directing people to read about my visit.
2006: Better Blogging
A number of my classmates also went on exchange and of course there were a number of students at Tsinghua who started blogs. But I self-hosted mine and the Chinese government never blocked Muschamp.ca, they did however block many, many websites including Blogger. As a result, some people lost access to their blog, at some point after experiencing all this, I gave some thought to how to blog better.
2007: CFA® Level I Candidate
After finishing my MBA many potential employers asked me if they hired me, would I enrol in the CFA Program. I of course said yes, even though Finance was not my specialization at business school. Eventually I just paid the fees myself and became a CFA Candidate. I really did want one of those better jobs business schools are always promising, for various reasons it did not happen for me when I graduated from the Sauder School of Business at the University of British Columbia.
2008: Converted
Either not much happened in 2008 or too much happened in 2008 or perhaps 2008 was a year that has been heavily edited on my blog. However on August 17th, I saw Bob Log III and Scott H. Biram play at Pat’s Pub in the notorious Downtown Eastside of Vancouver. The show was great, Scott even chatted me up, probably because I was wearing a Bloodshot Records t-shirt, his record label at the time. Also at the time I was working at a non-profit in the Downtown Eastside and we were trying to revitalize the then poorest postal code in Canada.
The fact that this was the most linked to and thus popular post of 2008 did surprise me, but calling this a popular blog post is really stretching the definition of popular.
2009: FREE CFA® Level 1 Study Materials
Not only is this next post the most popular blog post of 2009, it is the most popular blog post I’ve written of all time at least according to Google. Every day people find this post and click on it in Google’s search results. The fact I used a cringeworthy clickbait title just shows they work. The fact I spent years as a CFA Candidate and gave away study materials I made for free is a character flaw.
2010: Blogging Difficulties
As alluded to at the beginning of this blog post I’ve overcome a lot of challenges while maintaining this blog. I’ve been threatened with arrest and expulsion. I’ve been contacted by lawyers including those from the CFA Institute. I’ve had my web host go out of business, but that might have been before this blog existed, but I’ve also had my web host be acquired twice. I have had to deal with hackers, spammers, hotlinkers, intellectual property thieves and other unsavoury characters. So I’ve definitely encountered some blogging difficulties.
2011: My Top 10 SEO Tips
The first post I thought was the most popular of 2011 was a bit of a surprise but then I checked the data again and apparently some people really care about search engine optimization. I used to know a lot more about it and I used to measure my online popularity more carefully, but at some point I stopped caring about popularity and search engine optimization instead focusing on Quality; trying to write posts that were timely or better still timeless.
I’m not always successful.
2012: Focus & Repetition
Besides the importance of your writing being timely or timeless, other things you should strive for if you want to blog better is focus and repetition. Indeed the secret to improving at many things is focus and repetition. This blog isn’t very focussed especially in the olden days, but after 20 years of blogging, I’ve definitely put in my reps alone at the keyboard.
2013: Blog your way to a better career (they really, really mean it)
Since 2005, self proclaimed experts have been exclaiming I can blog my way to a better career. Now after 20 years of blogging, I don’t want to rain on any parades but a lot of these self proclaimed experts, well their blog is long gone from the Internet but mine remains.
2014: So long Suzhou
In 2014 I returned to China. It hadn’t been exactly ten years but it was close enough. I always swore I would return to Beijing to see the Summer Palace in the summer. As a result, after visiting Beijing I headed South via the new fast trains. China had changed a lot, especially Beijing, but for unknown reasons my stop in Suzhou was the most popular on my blog using my methodology when I wrote this post eleven years later.
The above photo is actually from my second trip to Suzhou, not the one in 2014. Suzhou is often called the Venice of China and indeed Marco Polo visited there in the 1200s, hence the boat in the canal photo.
2015: Living in Shanghai
To the surprise of many, including myself I actually returned to live and work in China. This time I lived in Shanghai and I actually taught English again as I was assured I could get a better job quickly and easily. For the record I taught English in Shanghai for four years.
At least I have a lot of photos of Shanghai to choose from.
2016: How I lost over 15 kilos in 2015
This is a depressing post to be the most popular of 2016. I did lose the weight and I did keep it off for many years but now in 2025 I may have gained it all back and possibly more. Now I’m another ten years older and have never really been the same since I had surgery. COVID and other injuries have also added up. None-the-less I still go to the gym and I think with some focus and repetition I could make progress again.
2017: Shanghai Tour Guide
I wasn’t actually a tour guide in Shanghai, but occasionally people would come to the big city and I would show them around. It was funny that I knew Shanghai better than many Chinese people, however I did live there for four years.
2018: Passed All 3 CFA® Exams
It took a long, long time and many, many hours of effort and a lot of focus and repetition but I did finally pass all three CFA Exams. I actually passed the last two in Shanghai. It isn’t a surprise this is one of my most linked to pieces of content, because of how much effort it took to achieve and how many setbacks I had to overcome.
I didn’t actually receive my piece of paper until 2022 as I had not yet met the work experience requirement in 2018.
2019: New Year, New WordPress
Once you finish studying for CFA exams you suddenly have free time. I was probably still looking for a new job, but I invested a lot of time upgrading and improving this very blog. It had been limping along on an outdated version of WordPress with abandoned plugins. So to start 2019 I gave it an overhaul. Lots of the people who write about their blogiversary discuss all the changes they’ve made cosmetically, but I haven’t made many as you can see below.
The image above is from the Wayback Machine and shows my blog from 2005, though it doesn’t render perfectly. The coloured boxes I drew to show whitespace from while I was still adjusting it in the CSS file. It is odd this is immortalized in the Wayback Machine. but you’ll also notice that my website is not fundamentally different from how it is now, at least on desktop computers.
My previous major change to my website cosmetically before that was in 2016. That was when I installed WPTouch and before that it last changed significantly in 2013. Which is the screenshot you see next. You can also see how my blog used to look on my iPhone below when I installed a plugin. It still looks similar today, unless your iPhone is in “reader mode”.
2020: In the time of the Coronavirus
When I moved to Calgary I did not blog much. I worked a lot of long hours and even after COVID-19 appeared we just kept working. I was working from the living room of a one bedroom apartment I had rented in the Beltline. Eventually I bought my own place 300 metres away.
I double checked and under the methodology I established this was the most popular post of 2020, probably because it is the only one I wrote about living and working in Calgary during the Coronavirus.
2021: The end of an era
In 2021 I was in my new (to me) condo. I know this as I remember reading the news on Facebook, at this very desk I’m currently typing at. Rob Miller had given up trying to manage Bloodshot Records and had agreed to sell it. Certain record labels and the artists had a big effect on me. First there was DefJam in the 80s, then there was Bloodshot and Fat Possum in the 90s. Only Fat Possum is still independent and under the original ownership, but it no longer exclusively releases hill country blues.
2022: Palawan, The Philippines
When COVID restrictions finally let up and I was granted two weeks vacation I made the somewhat impulsive decision to go to Palawan in The Philippines. It is definitely more photogenic than old screenshots of my blog.
2023: Apple M2 Pro MacBook Pro, Oh So Pro
2023 must have been another slow year in the Blogosphere. I probably worked a lot and decided to spend some money on a MacBook Pro. I’ve had a series of Macs going back to the original personal super computer which can be seen in a photo further below. I’m typing on the MacBook Pro right now, but I have it hooked up to two external monitors as shown below. Perhaps James Snape will be happy this was my top post of 2023. Who is James Snape and why does he like pictures of desks? You’ll just have to read on to find out.
2024: Redoing my blog taxonomy again
For the record I still haven’t finished redoing my blog taxonomy. Because I got so fed up with the performance of my website on my previous web host I ultimately gave up after getting it mostly revised. So although I haven’t changed the look and feel of my website much over the years I have changed the taxonomy on this blog multiple times. This latest taxonomy is hopefully my forever taxonomy as I’m down to seven categories and even though experts will tell you I have too many posts in the default unclassified category, most experts haven’t written as many blog posts as me or maintained a blog for 20 years.
Neither redoing my taxonomy nor changing web hosts made me popular. Neither did installing Yoast’s plugin and trying to follow their blog optimization guide. I posted some simple SEO advice above but I recommend focus and repetition over 20 years of blogging if you want to be popular, this also means you and your interests and your lifestyle can not change ever, enjoy!
2025: Finally bought an electric guitar
In 2025, I completed something of a lifelong dream, or at least an ambition I’ve had for twenty or more years, that was to buy a Gretsch electric guitar. I ended up getting a 6120 Nashville in Cadillac Green. Now I just have to stop blogging long enough to play it.
This sentence will make the text layout better with the Flickr photo, there is probably some way to fix the CSS but I just don’t have the time right now. Even after 20 years of blogging I’m still refining my technique.
Others who made it 20 years in the Blogosphere
Prior to writing this post I did a lot of preparation. This included redoing my taxonomy, the removing of no longer desirable content, and ultimately moving my entire website to a different web host. I also did some research to see how others marked 20 years of blogging. Few people end up doing so, especially sticking to one platform, one domain, and even one WordPress theme like I did.
- WordPress itself turned twenty in 2023, I found a retrospective on how it has changed over the years.
- Diego Elio Pettenò has used six different platforms in his 20 years of blogging.
- Julio Merino opted for a lot of graphs and screenshots for his 20 years of blogging, he too changed platforms and domains many times.
- Raymond Camden shared his lessons learned in 20 years of blogging, scarily I may have read his ColdFusion blog back in the day, he too has changed blogging platforms multiple times. He offers some advice that is similar to mine.
- James Snape celebrated his 20-year blogging anniversary by including an old desk photo. So in honour of James and using the power of Apple Photos I present to you below the oldest digital photo of my computer desk setup taken on June 10th 2002 before this blog was online and possibly even this domain! I still have most of that stuff including the LaCie CD burner and even the blue IKEA garbage can is still beside me. Neil Young of course continues to look down on me from above.
- The final 20 years of blogging posts I found was by Sam Willison. He opted for a retrospective similar to mine, highlighting influential posts he’s written over the years.
- Here is a bonus 20 years of being a blogger post by Cory Doctorow. He seems to have an overly complicated system, but then again he blogs every day and made a career out of writing, so apparently it works for him.
One thing I noticed besides never abandoning WordPress or even changing themes, was I did not care much to be popular. Or perhaps I like to think I stopped caring about being popular. Sure I measured things with Google Analytics and other services and techniques. And I did write multiple posts on improving your blog, often with an eye to becoming more popular, but that was as much for the benefit of others as myself. Long ago I decided to focus on Quality.
Unlike some of the bloggers I linked to above, I also didn’t lose any content accidentally, this comes from sticking with one CMS and obviously taking the odd backup over the years. The fact I’ve deleted hundreds of posts may shock people still reading down this far, but if those posts had a purpose they served it. Over the last twenty years I’ve gone through a lot and if some of it I no longer care to write about or maintain old webpages about, c’est la vie.
Hopefully the best content remains online at the same URL it was at for the last twenty or more years.
What’s next after 20 years of blogging?
If you read my previous post you’ll know I should be preparing for my next online course. It starts September 8th and we are expected to prepare by reviewing various material. I’ve put entirely too much work into this blog and doubt the ROI will be positive any time soon. I would like to have time for hobbies such as painting miniatures and playing guitar which is why I think hobbies are a good thing to focus on when you are blogging. I’d also like to take more time off from work to travel, something I will try hard to do next year.
In the mean time I really must wrap up this post. AI and generated content is more and more prevalent online, but I just want to assure you that I wrote all the text during the past 20 years of blogging. If you have thoughts on WordPress or blogging you can leave a comment below.
]]>I previously read one of Yves Hilpisch’s books back when I was unemployed or had just started working in Finance. A lot has happened since then including COVID-19. I still work for the same firm in Calgary but there is a renewed push to use AI in Finance and although that is not the book I previously read, I had been following Yves on Twitter and was on his mailing list for years, so was familiar with the courses he offered.
The CPF, however looked like a lot of work, and my day job is of course, demanding. Although I’d already learned a fair amount of Python, I’m just not leveraging in my day job. However, anything involving AI, machine learning, or natural language processing is getting pushed hard at the firm and in the industry. So as we have a professional development budget which I had not been touching, it was hinted strongly I should do something.
Previous Adventures in Python
In 2018, I finally passed the third and final CFA® exam. The running joke online back then was as soon as you finished studying for the CFA exam you started learning Python, so of course I did. Python was also appearing on many, many job postings and I was definitely looking for a new job in 2018.
Eventually, I did find a new job but I had to relocate halfway around the world to do so. While all that was going on I continued to learn Python eventually reading a book by Wes McKinney. I definitely read Wes’s book before I read any of Yves’s books. Wes has a lengthy biography on his website and he must speak at conferences, however his books and online tutorials will have to suffice if you want to learn more about pandas from its creator.
After reading “Python for Data Analysis”, I must have moved on to financial analysis which is when I took my first online Python course through Udemy. It was about that time, when I read one of Yves books. And during this period I finally got a new job and relocated to Calgary where Python largely got put on hold as there was a large project involving moving the firm from things like Advent Portfolio Exchange, FactSet, and Charles River IMS to SimCorp Dimensions. I also made a lot of Power BI dashboards and wrote a lot of SQL, but almost no Python code.
Having already completed one online course and not even mentioning it on my resume for six years, I enrolled in another certificate leveraging Python, this time offered by the CFA Institute as I was being strongly encouraged on multiple fronts to do more professional development and to get on the AI bandwagon.
Artificial intelligence, machine learning and natural language processing were some of the focuses of the Data Science for Investment Professionals certificate I just completed. This was actually my 2024 professional development efforts, as I started this certificate in October of 2024. The Data Science for Investment Professionals certificate consists of five online courses and I estimated it took me well over 100 hours to complete them all. The other program I considered last year was the CPF. So I doubled down on Python for Finance.
Preparing for the Program
I probably should have prepared even more for this online course. I was strongly encouraged to do an introductory online course on Yves’s platform and I intend to. It seems to be 35 videos long and likely covers some of the material in the books I’ve read and the previous two online courses I’ve taken.
The online learning platform is of course password protected, but Yves and the CPF program are on social media and prior to registering I did watch one or two free online videos where Yves introduces some of the material that will be covered, explains why the material was chosen, and how the online learning platform works. He refers to his online learning platform as “the Quant Platform” if you watch the two videos below.
Python for Finance Bootcamp
When you register for the program, Yves suggests you prepare by watching 90 hours of videos. The first videos you should watch are what he refers to as the PFF Bootcamp with PFF being “Python for Finance”. I actually couldn’t get the first video to play originally, but every single online course I’ve ever take has had technical problems. You can contact Yves or someone on his team via the Internet and eventually I and others could get the videos to play.
The PFF bootcamp currently consists of three videos and they are long, the first video covers Python syntax but also might briefly touch on matplotlib, this is the one I only reviewed the code for. There are Jupyter notebooks and often other files you can download or you can run the code on the online learning platform. The PFF Bootcamp is an overview of the material covered in the course and is similar to the videos above. It is a lot like pair programming as you sit there and watch Yves type the code on the screen. I didn’t type along with him in the second and third video, but maybe I will in the future. However if you get the data and code at the end of class, you can modify that version should you be so inclined at a later date.
I did watch the second and third video and they go more in depth. The first assumes you know almost no Python syntax. The second video covers NumPy and the ndarray which is faster than the native list and tuple objects in some instances. NumPy or Numerical Python has a lot of useful features for financial analysis as I and others have covered before. You can definitely use matplotlib to create line graphs and histograms. The third video focuses on pandas which has another datatype known as a DataFrame. This is very useful for financial data such as time series. Also covered is SciKit-learn aka sklearn which is used in the PFF Bootcamp for machine learning and backtesting. The algorithm we look into is for evaluating American Puts using OLS Monte Carlo simulations and was first described in a paper by Longstaff and Schwartz.
The last thing covered was actually network programming which I haven’t done since I was an undergrad. It is definitely a lot less code to set up a client and server that communicates over TCP using a library called zmq. I had to do it in Java and I remember my client/server had to have a UI which I implemented in Swing. That code may still be on my laptop or on a floppy disk somewhere. I got a B- in CSC 450 apparently, but in my defence that was the first course I ever took in Java and those two assignments were the first Java code I ever wrote. They were my “Hello World”.
While I was a student, UVic kept changing programming languages. Now the course appears to be CSC 361.
Kickoff Session September 2025 Cohort
Yesterday, September 10th, was the kickoff to the final cohort of 2025 for the CPF. I got up at 6 AM to tune in and it is very much like the videos you see above from YouTube. Obviously there was some variance, he shared a recently released paper from Brynjolfsson, Chandar, and Chen. I’d already updated the study schedule and for the next three weeks will be focussing on the six Finance with Python lessons. My secondary focus will be to work through PFF Basics. These two modules might contain a lot of review for me. Finally a new module is being introduced on Thursday and that will focus on Deep Learning.
After the first three weeks you can specialize more and I will focus on Python for Asset Management as well as continuing to learn about Deep Learning and AI in Finance. There are also modules on agents and generative AI. Basically everything that is new and trendy I will study because I already have done a discounted cashflow and a Monte Carlo simulation before in Python and definitely in Excel.
You can run the Jupyter notebooks online, though some code you must run locally. I actually have taken to typing along on my local machine, though you don’t need to type out everything as at the end of class the code is uploaded somewhere where you can download it. I just find that by typing along I might pay attention better. When the lessons are pre-recorded you can also pause the video if you can’t type fast enough.
Finance with Python
Officially I am a quarter of the way through program, but I have of course fallen slightly behind. I did finish the main course, Finance with Python, and of course did additional studies including attending the new Deep Learning classes. I have not done all the tutorials or exercises or readings. I’ve been focusing on watching the videos and coding along. The fourth week was hard to find time and energy to study, but now that is Sunday I am trying to catch up.
Next weekend is Thanksgiving here in Canada so I likely fall further behind, which is why I’m not really holding myself to a strict 16 weeks to complete everything schedule, which even Yves likely thinks is a challenge. Instead I’ll try to keep up with the core classes and live lessons and then allow myself more time to complete the final project and cover additional material. I plan to start the AI in Finance portion soon and actually ordered the book, so I can read along and reduce my screen time.
I did want to give a quick update acknowledging I’m grinding along even if I lack all the time and energy necessary, progress has definitely been made and I wanted to try and add a code snippet to this WordPress post as it was one of the algorithms or techniques we’ve been studying the last few weeks, Least-Squares Monte Carlo Valuation. You’ll of course need to import the right libraries and declare all the variables but this is the penultimate Jupyter notebook cell.
# Least-Squares Monte Carlo Valuation (LSM algorithm)
V = h[-1]
for t in range(M - 1, 0, -1): # start at the second but last, backwards induction
reg = np.polyfit(S[t], df * V, deg=5)
C = np.polyval(reg, S[t])
V = np.where(h[t] > C, h[t], df * V)Python for Asset Management
Based on my current job, the most obvious stream to initially focus on is asset management. I do plan to cover Artificial Intelligence in Finance, I did buy the printed book from O’Riley. However, with Thanksgiving and having been sick for over a week, I had to be even more realistic how much I can accomplish in a given week or weekend. This most recent weekend I managed to watch two videos and complete an actual tutorial assignment, along with running various personal errands. It will be hard for me to do much more than that on an average weekend.
I’ve also stopped typing out all the code. There are necessary changes to the code featured in the videos that must be made due to the advancement of Python libraries and the depreciation of functions and methods. So rather than debug and investigate all these myself I use Yves’s fixes. Now I generally just add additional comments to the code, which greatly speeds things up now that the code is denser and a single typo can be extremely difficult to spot. Maybe I’ll be forced to type along again…
My solution to the assignment must have been sufficient. It was daunting at first but I reviewed example code and looked up areas of Python I was less familiar with such as Class and Static methods, I’m not sure I’ve ever created a Class before in Python, certainly not recently, but all that was necessary for me to complete the assignment. It took me most of a day, at least an entire afternoon, to complete the assignment and there were a few more things I have improved since. I took the exact assignment text from the email and put it into a large language model and it spit out some convincing looking Python code which I’ve yet to test. I suspect online courses like offline courses have a lot of issues with people getting agents and LLMs to do their assignments.
Overlap with previous studies
As someone who has done a computer science degree, an MBA, completed the CFA® Program, and studied Python and Data Science before, I knew there would be materials I’d previously seen but the program has so much material and new videos seem to be added most weeks, there is more material than I can cover in a limited amount of time. For instances, the most recent lesson I completed covered portfolio optimization techniques first documented by Black and Litterman in 1992.
Other topics covered recently include:
- Black Scholes Merton
- Markowitz Portfolio Theory
- The Capital Asset Pricing Model
- The Efficient Frontier
- The Security Market Line
- The Capital Market Line
During this course I’ve made no further progress updating my blog’s taxonomy. In fact I couldn’t even update my blog yesterday and I was not happy. I don’t think I’ve played my new guitar and I certainly haven’t had any time for other hobbies like gaming or miniature painting. Maybe next year will be better, but it is hard to be optimistic at this time. My plan is to keep my head down and grind away. I’ve booked my flight home for Christmas and will book a vacation in March to return to Japan.
Practice Project and Final Project
At some point I got an email informing me I had to do a practice project. I stuck with asset management and my solution must have been good enough as I was encouraged to submit my proposal for my final project. Alas that was deemed “a bit like a buffet, a bit of everything but nothing really delicious for my taste.” So I was encouraged to focus on using reinforcement learning to improve portfolio optimization. Alas that was one of the books and classes I did not complete by December.
So after taking a break for Christmas I will attempt to absorb this new material and revise my proposal to be more specific, though all the features I proposed in the class are needed in my opinion so I may code them up eventually. However as it is now 2026, this will be one of the last updates to this blog post as I will possibly write a separate post detailing my final project when I’m able.
Progress has been slow
I’ve done a lot of reading and I actually spent a lot of time trying to get the code in Reinforcement Learning for Finance to run on my local machine. Apparently it requires TensorFlow 2.10 which you can no longer install with pip but worse Google Colab where my final project must run is also using TensorFlow 2.19. Yves must be aware of this as he seems to have written his latest AI code to use PyTorch, this is the same conclusion I and Aurélien Géron have come to. Aurélien is the author of the most recent book I’m reading. I definitely don’t want my final project to only run on an old version of TensorFlow, PyTorch seems to be where people are moving, at least most people who write O’Reilly books.
Using Google Colab is another thing Yves and Aurélien seem to agree on, this offloads the maintenance of an online coding environment to a corporate juggernaut but forces you to use the libraries they include in their online coding environment. PyTorch was invented by Meta *cough* Facebook *cough* but is supported by Google though they also have their own framework called Jax.
While trying to find answers online to some problem I was facing in Python for Finance, I found a video of Yves talking more about Reinforcement Learning for Finance. Then even more recently he released a new video about the Certificate in Python for Finance so hopefully I can include both below. I must make more progress as I still plan to travel to Japan in March 2026 and had hoped to have this course finished before then.
The Grind is Real
Now that more than half of February has passed, I’m still not finished my final project. I have gotten many features I wanted to implement working in various proof of concept jupyter notebooks. And tonight I plan to review the video and code for using Reinforcement Learning to allocate funds between three assets which I must extend and incorporate into my notebooks. After that there is one more technique I want to explore more and of course various calculations I want to perform to measure portfolio risk. This is still a lot of work to complete by March 3rd when I’m scheduled to fly to Japan.
I’m certainly not giving up, but the reason I wanted to update my post about doing a professional development certificate in Python for Finance is something I read on LinkedIn. Before I officially decided to do this certificate I did some research, certainly more research than I did when I agreed to do the CFA Institute’s Data Science for Investment Professionals certificate. Another program I learned about with a very similar acronym is the CQF and I’ve been kicking around the idea of doing that program next, perhaps starting in June.
Alas I’m exhausted, and I definitely think there are diminishing returns to doing these professional development certificates. I can’t say it has been worth it, but I do want to position myself better for the future as AI is coming for a lot of jobs, so if all you do in yours is forward on emails from your boss to someone else to get the data and perform the calculations in Excel and then you put the results in PowerPoint or another format, maybe AI can do your job.
It turns out Yves is also teaching as part of the CQF program and I’ve already put in so much time, putting in another six months or a year shouldn’t kill me. I do think I can complete my current program even if I fail to do so before March 3rd. That remains my highest priority, but below are some articles on finance professional development certificates I’ve read recently, as there certainly seem to be more than there were twenty years ago.
- How to choose your quantitative finance course?
- CFA vs CQF – What Is It, Comparative Table & Infographic
- Getting Technical with the CQF
- Global survey points to a new era of upskilling
- Quantt CQF Review 2026
Submitted my final project
As mentioned at least twice previously, I travel to Japan in March for a long overdue vacation. I worked furiously on this Python for Finance final project, working on it many times late into the night and of course on every weekend since my birthday. All told, I worked on this project and various prototypes and proofs of concept for almost three months. I still don’t know if it is good enough, especially as my conclusion is I should have done the whole thing differently. Instead of optimizing for the Sharpe Ratio, I think my Investing Agent and his neural network should instead be trying to increase the Information Ratio as that would incorporate direct competition with the benchmark.
Unfortunately, hindsight is often 20/20. I did look at the code and I would have to modify multiple methods but even more so I’d have to retrain, retune, and basically do the project over again to optimize for Information Ratio. It is not something I have the energy for the Sunday before I fly to Japan. We’ll see what Yves says, because there is no guarantee the Agent will perform better trying to increase Information Ratio instead of Sharpe Ratio, it was just a theory I had after spending months studying and coding in the Python for Finance certificate program.
I did use Python to produce a lot of graphs, but even that was ultimately disappointing. In Google Colab the bigger graphs did not render well in one cell, so I had to make them all smaller. Then after doing all my graphing with matplotlib, I suddenly got the idea to try using seaborn as it can quickly produce good looking graphs, but ultimately the interactivity of plotly may have been the way to go. But again on a Sunday before submitting my final project changing every single graph was not something I had the energy for. Like I said several paragraphs back and multiple times to multiple people. I’m exhausted.
I’ll have to think long and hard before agreeing to do more professional development. My MBA was a terrible experience, the worst of my life. The CFA Program took me way longer than three years. The next certificate I did from the CFA Institute was supposed to take 90-100 hours but of course I spent way longer studying for a test no one cares about. This program was estimated to be completable in 16 weeks by many participants. I however, spent almost twice as long and most of that time was spent just on the final project. Hopefully, you like the graphs. I’m finally going on vacation.
The final project has a lot of requirements, two of them were finally adding a README.md file to my github repository and trying to ensure all the code was done to the PEP8 standards. I’ll find out how I did when I get back from Japan, though I’ll probably check my email at some point.
Wrapping up
I had hoped to complete this online professional development certificate program in a timely manner, though it did take me longer than sixteen weeks, which I expected. I’m not sure how much more I’ll blog about it, perhaps one more post about the final project. I tried to be disciplined in covering the material and taking notes, but there is a lot of material online about this course and Python in general since I first started studying Python for Finance. I had hoped to learn some new tricks with a renewed focus on AI and machine learning.
WordPress might be better at including code samples than it was 20 years ago. I really did try studying as close to daily as I could manage to cover all this material close to on schedule. Since I moved my website, Google seems to be indexing it less deeply, but my new posts generally show up in the index eventually, it might help to post them to social media, but there is a lot of competition for “Python for Finance”. Eventually I did find another account of taking this same program, tsferro seems to have focussed on algorithmic trading and to start 2026 the course material was revised yet again, so be sure and read the latest curriculum.
If you did stumble across this and have thoughts you can leave a comment below. It took a lot of effort to finish this program, I finally received confirmation of my completion in April 2026. My project was about portfolio construction and I did use reinforcement learning to try to actively allocate the assets, however no trading was done, just backtesting and simulation. I may write more about my final project and I may even revise it further as I think the agent needs to be incentivized more to take on more risk when his neural network deems it advantageous, or at least that is the pipe dream.
]]>There isn’t a lot of information on this certificate online. It seems to have been deemphasized on their website after being touted in this press release. This program was heavily marketed to me via email. I must have fit their target profile, either that or not very many people were signing up so anyone who indicated they had a professional development allowance in the annual CFA Members survey was inundated with emails.
Now it seems this certificate is no longer offered and some of the material may be rolled into the flagship CFA Program. That isn’t a glowing endorsement of all the time I spent studying for this certificate and doing professional development through the CFA Institute.
Regardless we do have an allowance for professional development at my firm and I had not used mine for the previous year or perhaps even the year before that. The CFA program was a long hard slog for me, but since completing it the CFA Institute has introduced some professional learning requirements or at least suggestions which I had probably ignored. It turns out to earn your 20 PL credits you don’t need to pay the CFA Institute more money and take another course from them. I really should have done more research prior to registering, but I was being pressured at work to do something with my budget allotment for professional development as part of our annual employee review process.
What is Data Science?
Data science combines math and statistics, specialized programming, advanced analytics, artificial intelligence and machine learning with specific subject matter expertise to uncover actionable insights hidden in an organization’s data. These insights can be used to guide decision making and strategic planning.
IBM
Data Science was sexy for a while, but now AI is eating the world. This course is however approximately 33% AI, but it is also 33% math. Which despite being covered in my masters degree, undergrad degree, and of course the CFA program itself, I once again slogged through. You’d think I’d mastered mean, mode, and median by now. The other third of this data science certificate covers things like ethics, data governance, even some story telling with data and graphics.
Although I cannot say I’m a regular reader, the blogosphere having also been eaten by AI, I am however, aware of the towards data science website. They have also stuck AI in their tagline. The press release from the CFA Institute, if you didn’t bother to read it yet, had the following to say about what participants would learn in this course:
- Describe and evaluate machine learning techniques
- Select and develop data visualizations using Python and R
- Apply machine learning to address investment problems
- Explain machine learning techniques to a non-expert audience
- Use natural language processing to make investment decisions
- Evaluate and mitigate machine learning biases
So data science includes artificial intelligence because it includes machine learning. Large language models were also covered. Data science also includes statistics whether the aforementioned measurements of central tendency or the also heavily covered linear regressions. This course and data science in general is heavily entwined with Python and various open source libraries such as pandas or numpy. There is a bit of R in this course and of course there is no reason you can’t calculate the mean geometric or otherwise in Excel or SQL or the programming language of your choice, but to complete this course you must learn a little Python.
Who is this certificate for?
Investment professionals is right in the title. A lot of people register for the CFA Program who don’t seem fully committed to reference W. H. Auden and amazingly I remembered the exact poet and line from his poem. I’m not even sure I’ve read any W. H. Auden, if I did it would have been a long long time ago. Gappy will be so proud of me. He’s trying to bring more poetry into finance. I myself tried but the poet I chose was William Blake.
So as I was saying before I got poetically sidetracked, this course is aimed at investment professionals so people who already have experience in the investment industry. It can be used as professional learning credits for the CFA or CIPM. Despite how heavily it was marketed to me I’m not sure I was the target audience. It is true I did finish the CFA program a number of years ago before they added Python to the curriculum but I took the initiative and learned Python myself reading several books and even taking an online course.
This course is aimed at someone less technical than me. The CFA Institute spends considerable time going on about the t-shaped team and they see the person who completes this certificate as fitting into a very specific role on a data science or machine learning project in the investment industry. One of the best parts of the entire course is when they interview industry professionals about how they use AI, data science, and machine learning at their firm.
I don’t think there are any prerequisites for this course. You do not have to be a CFA Charterholder, you do not need to know any Python or even statistics before starting this certificate. I do think it is targeted at people already in the industry rather than people fresh out of school or still in school who wish to become investment professionals. The course was developed to address a skills gap, but if you Google you won’t find much about the course, but reddit does have an opinion.
How long did it take to complete?
I really should have researched professional development courses more and since enrolling in this one I have, but I was being pressured to both spend my professional development budget for 2024 and become an expert or at least competent in AI and how it can be used in the investment industry. My official estimate on how long I spent on the course was 132 hours. It probably took me longer, the scars from the actual CFA program have not fully healed. I was taking no chances with this course, I made hundreds of flashcards, I did all the optional readings, I even had to dig deeper in some topics if the official 5 or 10 minute video was not a sufficient explanation.
Officially the five courses take approximately 100 hours to complete but I’ve also seen the CFA Institute say the certificate can be earned in 90-100 hours. You have one year to complete the courses, that is 365 days after you register. I’m not sure the CFA marketing machine is hooked up to their online learning platform as even after I was registered for the course, I was still getting emails encouraging me to register for the course. I was approximately 80% finished when they emailed me, informing me, I had used up half of the time I would have access to the learning material.
Is it harder than the CFA Program?
No.
The old estimate for a single level of the CFA program was 300 hours, hence the website name. The CFA program also has 3 levels, so at most this certificate is one ninth as difficult as the CFA program and it is probably less difficult than that. The online exam is not proctored for instance, although they do ask you not to use AI to answer questions in their AI course. I know the CFA has embraced online learning and I learned at a UVic alumni event that universities have embraced micro-credentials as well and that is what this is, it is closer to a micro-credential than a masters equivalent which is how the CFA Institute likes to market their flagship program.
Seriously, how hard is it?
I gave this some further thought and there are five courses, each course has say five module and each module has say five lessons. After every lesson there is usually a quiz, assignment, or coding lab or even possibly all three. So that is minimum 125 things, some of them are must pass with the passing score being 66%. At the end of every course there is an exam then at the end of the certificate there is another exam so that is an estimated 131 things which may be must pass. The certificate final exam has a minimum passing score of 70% and it is timed, so it is more stressful than some random quiz in some random module.
Currently I still have access to the material, so I could literally go and count every assignment, quiz, reading, and video but I suspect the certificate is going to change. I was not the only person to notice it seems to have disappeared from the CFA Institute’s website.
How much Python do you learn?
Not much.
If you want to master Python this is not the course for you. It isn’t a programming certificate. You are not expected to write much Python at all. What is expected, is to be able to read and run Python scripts in coding labs. There is some language syntax you must learn, but it is more about developing awareness on what you can do with Python and what open source libraries are out there than writing new original code yourself.
Would I recommend this course?
I recommend you shop around. I am not as negative as the reddit community is about this course but it did cost a lot, well over $1000 USD. I was fortunate in that I could get it paid for by my firm, but I paid for my MBA and CFA programs myself. I’m long overdue to get on the gravy train. The course also did take me a significant investment of time, studying after work and on weekends. There are a lot of videos which I’m told the cool kids watch on 2X speed at least.
As mentioned above I previously took an online Python for Finance course. I actually became competent at Python previously then the job I got didn’t really use it. Some people love their Excel spreadsheets and SQL Server databases. Now we may be finally using Python more at work. So all things considered, I recommend you shop around as there are lots of free or cheaper courses online, but my boss at the time was happy I chose this course because it ticks a lot of boxes, the CFA Institute’s name still carries weight in some circles and this course is definitely buzzword heavy.
Do you get a piece of paper?
No.
My coworker thought for sure given the cost and how long it was taking me I’d get a piece of paper I could frame and put on the wall. What I did get was six online badges!
COVID-19 had a big effect on the CFA program and education in general. Apparently enrolment in the flagship program is down. In-person exams were of course cancelled and computerized exams became the norm. All the CFA exams I sat were completed with pencil or pen on paper. Towards the end of my time as a CFA candidate they introduced online practice problems and their system would keep track of your long run average so you didn’t have to do it in Excel or on a stickie note. At some point the CFA Institute introduced online badges, originally using a company called Basno. Then more recently they must have developed their own online credentialing system.
The purpose of the online badges is to certify you actually completed the course as apparently many people lie on their resumes. I’ve been too honest for my own good, but I did share my completion of the courses and earning of the badges on LinkedIn and then one of the first things I updated on this website when I got it back working was my resume.
What’s next?
I probably spent too long on this certificate. I passed it with a decent enough score, I spent a lot of time reviewing for the online exams. Although it is probably possible to fast forward through the many videos, there are also PDFs you are expected to read. In fact at some point I found Data_Science_Certificate_Glossary.pdf which has all the glossaries for all the courses in a single document.
The glossary is a useful overview of the material which the CFA Institute appears to have made available. As someone who got in trouble previously for posting a screenshot of the CFA Institute’s website and has spent years jumping through hoops and adding ® to the first occurrence of CFA on every webpage and blog post I have, I was hesitant to write about this course until it was finished. I also didn’t know if I should post any screenshots but since they are just graphs produced by open source libraries that is unlikely to violate their intellectual property rights. Somewhere it specifically said I could display my badges on my own website.
During this certificate, just like while I was in the actual CFA program I gave up on many hobbies, this includes miniature painting and all forms of gaming. I expended a lot of effort to finish the certificate, before I took my trip to Toronto and since completing the certificate have played a lot of Sid Meier’s Civilization VII. But I also registered for yet another online course, the Certificate in Python for Finance. I consider taking this course last year, but opted for the CFA one as I wanted to earn some PL, but you do not have to take courses from the CFA Institute to earn your professional learning credits.
This next Python for Finance course will definitely require me to relearn a lot of things I’ve forgotten and hopefully will further improve my knowledge of all things data science, machine learning, and AI in Finance. As a result miniature painting and gaming will likely have to wait until next year as will travelling abroad. My new online professional development course will take at least sixteen weeks and likely a lot longer as my job is quite demanding. I do hope to find time to play my new guitar more. If you have any thoughts on the CFA Institute, the courses it offers, or professional development in general you can leave a comment below.
]]>As this is the third of six blog posts I want to write before the end of the month or at least before too long I need to be judicious with my words. My mom literally said my last blog post was a “long read”. I had never seen Murder By Death before and I had never been to Toronto before. So when the band announced this would be their farewell tour I got a ticket to their first Canadian show of the tour on the day of the announcement. The show I perhaps should have gotten tickets to was their last show in Louisville Kentucky, a lot of people are traveling from out of town for the tour ending show.
I did consider other shows or a second show, even the next day in Montreal, but a lot of shows have sold out by now and like I said in the first sentence, I’m optimistic they’ll play again. Maybe it will never be as big a tour as this one with the projections, the lights, and the smoke. But they vowed to play every year in a cave in Pelham Tennessee. They even released a live album or included it in their latest Kickstarter called “Live… & Underground”. It may be my favourite Murder By Death album now.
Someone wrote a much lengthier summation of Murder By Death about their sound and appeal, but I forgot to link to it when I originally wrote this post. I won’t feel too bad if you pop over and read the primer from the A.V. Club.
The Show
The show was good. I wasn’t that worried, but Murder By Death are definitely talented. The show sold well enough that the venue was upgraded. It may have even been possible that I could have upgraded my ticket to have a seat. As the picture shows above the show started early and Laura Jane Grace and band opened. I didn’t take many photos but I put a couple on Flickr.
As I’ve gotten older standing for hours has gotten harder and being able to sit and watch the band even if I can’t get right up close has more appeal. Ironically the next concert I went to, I did wait for a break in the bands and got much closer to the stage for the headliner, Jason Isbell. Beer was not cheap at the Danforth Music Hall, but because it ended early and I stayed nearby I had no trouble getting back to my hotel by public transportation.
Why Murder By Death?
Murder By Death is a band I learned about from a Bloodshot Records CD sampler. I might have been sadder when Bloodshot came to an end. But nowadays record labels are less important and bands can do-it-yourself. Murder By Death are an outlier, even on Bloodshot Records. They feature the cello and they famously let fans pick cover songs on Kickstarter. Those Kickstarter covers projects songs were a big part of making me a fan.
I lived in China for a long time. I did get Bloodshot to mail me some CDs there once, but later I would just buy a digital copy though Apple or Bandcamp or some other website. I think I bought quite a few Murder By Death songs through Bandcamp. Eventually I moved back to Canada, got a better job and was able to kickstart a number of albums possibly starting with the Christmas album.
Murder By Death does well at selling merch, whether it is through Kickstarter or at their shows. I think I have more Murder By Death t-shirts than any other band. I need to update that portion of my website next. I picked up a hoodie and a glow in the dark t-shirt at the show and when I got back my Kickstarter package had finally shown up so that contained another t-shirt. I never met any members of the Whiskey Crew but I did join the Facebook group, maybe next time…
We used to travel from Vancouver Island to see shows in Vancouver and once even to Portland, but the only two artists I’ve ever flown to see were Neil Young & Crazy Horse on their first cross-Canada tour and Murder By Death. I’ll try to embed a YouTube video, but I’ve recently learned that almost all the videos I’ve embedded over the years no longer work because Google stopped allowing them to work.
Someone filmed a whole set, let’s see if I can embed it, nope but I can link to it. It seems to be recorded from the front row in Boston. They were changing their set most every night, but this is a pretty good representation of what you missed if you never saw Murder By Death.
Toronto
Although I’d never been to Toronto, I did previously live in Ontario. Instead of visiting Toronto I visited New York and Montreal and I don’t regret it. That said I didn’t do a lot of planning for this trip. My number one reason to visit Toronto was it being easy and possibly the cheapest option for seeing Murder By Death on their farewell tour. I actually thought the hotel would be more expensive, but I made up for it by spending too much at the Nike store perhaps.
My number two reason to visit Toronto was to see the Stanley Cup. There is generally always one of them at the Hockey Hall of Fame so I walked there being harassed along the way. I ended up walking more than I should have in Toronto which is why I was probably less enthusiastic about standing for the show. The day after I actually walked more and it was even hotter.
Having already seen Murder By Death, the Stanley Cup, the CN Tower, both the sports stadiums but not actually going to a game, what would I do with my second full day in Toronto? It was suggested I see the Jays and they were in town all weekend playing Detroit. Instead I decided to walk around and see more of the city. Rather than going record shopping, I went book shopping. I thought that may be even more Murder By Death approved so I went to one of Canada’s oldest science fiction bookstores and Toronto’s horror bookshop and picked up two books neither of which I’ve managed to read yet. I also made sure to pick up some tchotchkes for friends and family.
The subway isn’t spotless and I’m no expert on Toronto’s public transport system but I was able to use the subway a lot, my hotel was chosen to be easy to get to the Danforth. I also took a street car while in Toronto, which I wasn’t sure where to catch at first so I just walked along the route until I found a spot. Finally I took the train from the airport so I can recommend that. It hooks up with the subway so if you don’t have much luggage you can transfer and get to your hotel pretty easily if you book a hotel near a subway station like I did. Toronto is a big city so be prepared to do some walking.
Where to next?
It is now August 17th and I’ve only taken two days off all year, the DIY long weekend I went to Toronto. I didn’t work that many weekends but I did study including on statutory holidays so I’m exhausted. I actually have time off next week but I’m not travelling outside of Alberta. My mother and sister are coming to visit. They along with my sister’s dog Jazz come to visit me most summers. Obviously they couldn’t come during COVID but most every summer they do visit, so we will go seem some dinosaur bones and drink some champagne. They are also big on thrift shopping.
I’ll next fly home for Thanksgiving. I want to take a trip and when I did decide finally to get a ticket to the last show in Kentucky I learned that show has sold out. I could go to another show, but I registered for another course and that starts on September 8th. I really should be preparing for that, but updating my blog is kinda part of my preparation as I want to write about the professional development I’ve been doing this year. All that said I really want to go on vacation, but due to work and classes I may not travel anywhere else this year, but next year I’ll definitely travel abroad and I already contacted a tour provider.
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