As I mentioned in my last newsletter post, March was quite a busy month for me. I had a quick trip down to Sydney to help my mum move houses, and then some family events back in Tokyo to celebrate my marriage (since we skipped having a wedding last year).
And then in an unexpected turn of events, in mid-March my company laid off 10% of their employees and I was one of the people impacted. To sum all of that up, it is really just a surreal feeling to have your life upended like that.
In amongst all that I got a bit of hiking done, and put up some food and coffee posts on the blog as well.
Hiking to see the sakura at Mt Miura-Fuji
At the end of February I hiked Mt Miura-Fuji, located in Kanagawa prefecture. This was timed with the blooming of the “Kawazu-zakura”, an early-blooming variant of cherry blossom.
Everyone tends to associate that late March/early April period with the cherry blossom season, but if you know where to look, there’s opportunities to see these guys in February too!
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Hiking the stone quarries of Mt Nokogiri
The second hike up on my blog this month is Mt Nokogiri in Chiba. Chiba isn’t really a hiking destination (it’s quite a low-elevation part of Japan) but Mt Nokogiri is a nice hike if you are looking for something with interesting things to look at, as it’s also the site of a large stone quarry, plus the biggest stone-carved statue of Buddha in Japan.
Mt Nokogiri was the only mountain I hiked in March, so it was a pretty quiet month for me hiking-wise. I’m hoping to get back into some more hiking in the coming months, especially as the temperatures are warming up.
Entering my food blogger era
I also put up a couple of coffee and food spots that I have visited on the blog. I picked up hiking (and blogging about hiking) in the past couple of years, but originally before that I had wanted to start some sort of food review blog in Japan, so it’s funny that I’ve finally come full circle and got around to it.
While down in Australia, I visited the charmingly named Diggy Doo’s. And back in Japan, 27 Coffee Roasters Kamakura and Tsukikoya Coffee Roasters in Yokohama.
My aim for all of this is that if someone was looking for a coffee spot or a place to eat, they could take a look at my Map and find something that looks good nearby.
A weird start to 2026
I summed up 2025 as a “good year” with the hope for another good year this year, but 2026 feels like it’s turning into the “year that’s not going according to plan”.
Like I mentioned at the beginning of this post, I was impacted by a round of layoffs at my company. It was really lovely how many people reached out to me and offered their support. For now I’m just taking this as an opportunity to have a bit of a mental reset and focus on settling into a better exercise routine.
I had also planned to get a dog sometime this year, so we started looking into that this month. I’m sure it’s the same in many countries, but finding a place to rent that’s pet-friendly can be quite hard in Japan (it was in Australia too). I thought I had it all figured out, and we moved into a place last November which allows dogs up to a 10kg limit.
Long story short, we just found out from the building management that it’s actually a 10kg limit and there are max height/length limits, plus blanket bans on certain breeds altogether. So realistically this allows you to get an overweight toy poodle or chihuahua, and not an actual 10kg dog like a Shiba Inu that I was envisioning.
In hindsight of course we should have clarified the fine print before we moved in, but I naively just took the 10kg limit that they mentioned when we were looking at the place at face value. And our apartment lease is for 2 years. Oops. Of course we could get a tiny lapdog, or even some sort of small terrier breed that I could still go hiking with but I had my heart set on a Shiba (or adopting a mixed breed of some sort) so I think I may have to put a pause on the dog plans for now.
What’s next?
As you can imagine, my life is a little bit all over the place. For now I’m just going to take things one day at a time. I think things will still turn out ok, even if it’s not quite how I had envisioned 2026 going!
In April we were planning on going to Taiwan, but that’s looking a little less likely since my husband has been having visa issues (speaking of things not going to plan, ha). Either way, my April will consist of resting, some hiking, and of course some blogging.
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