Review

I loved the itinerary. I wished I could have had more time in Asakusa and the Hiroshima museum. It\'s not a big deal. I returned to Asakusa the morning I left and I will visit Hiroshima on my return to Japan.

I absolutely loved the lodging. The only issue I can remember is the hotel in Sapporo didn\'t have functioning A/C and the group was not made aware of it. Everyone woke up a sweaty mess that night and had to open the window.

I love how much food was provided. I grew tired of the set meals. I couldn\'t enjoy the Genghis Khan meal due to the tour guide constantly putting his raw meat over our cooked meat. It was a health concern. After the third time, my friend and I gave up eating. We even kept our meat to the 1/3 of the grill that was close to us. No use. Raw chicken on our cooked lamb and vegetables every time. We left hungry and went to find dinner elsewhere.

Mako, K and JJ were absolutely amazing guides. Especially JJ. The group enjoyed asking her various questions and she ALWAYS had answers. Hiro was not fluent in English. I brought to his attention that someone was missing and he kept telling me where the bathroom is. Finally I had to say, \"Vas-san wa doko des ka???\" That made him realize that Vas was indeed missing. My bathroom was locked in my room and I told Hiro and he didn\'t understand. I again had to mime and use my broken Japanese. Pretty dangerous to have a tour guide not understand English AND not pay attention to where everyone was. He also read from the signs when we toured the castle (or whatever it was) instead of adding to it. I can read the signs myself. I don\'t need the guide to do it. I actually hung back a bit to listen to another group\'s guide since Hiro wasn\'t saying much. I went on the optional tour and he rushed me and another lady out of a museum when we were watching a video. We ended the tour early, so I\'m not sure why we had to stop watching the video. It was jarring to have Mike as a tour guide. I really enjoyed having native guides. He wasn\'t able to answer questions like K, JJ and Mako. We had one particularly sarcastic old man in our group that would pick on the female tour guides. They all handled it well. It was incredibly cringe-worthy to watch him \"joke around\" with them.

Most of the guides had schedules with times to hand to us. That was wonderful. On days where we had guides that didn\'t hand us schedules, we would double check times with each other. Those days were more stressful.