Kyoto

Had a meeting down in Nagoya last week and decided to take the 30 min train down to Kyoto. Lots of stuff to do there and I definitely was not prepared. Saw a few maiko (Geisha in training). Saw about 4 or 5 shrines, and went through the fushima hike where there were thousands of torii gates. Apparently the gates are bought and left normally as a prayer type offering to a specific god, there were also little stores along the 'hike' at each god that had sake to leave for an offering as well. I definitely need to go back and see the golden shrine, we saw the silver shrine but it wasnt so silver, had a nice garden though.

Tochigi Central Park and Oarai

I made some Onegiri for the first time this weekend and took them to the park for a light lunch. This week was golden week where a lot of people have off for 5 days so Misato and I went to Oarai to see the beach and aquarium. I didnt get the whole week off because Im working for a US company here, but I took 2 days vacation instead. This park was really nice and Oarai was very pretty as well. We stayed in a house that was converted into a hotel where dinner and breakfast were included, only 5 rooms if you look at the pics you can see how small our room was, but it was big enough for the 2 of us for 1 night. The other rooms were about double the size of our room but a whole family of 6 stayed there. We took the train down to Oarai which took about and then rented a bicycle for the day. Bike rental was only about 2 bucks, and the train was super cheap too. Not as if I had any doubt, but after seeing the traffic jam in Oarai it was far better, cheaper and faster, to take the train and bicycle around. We biked over to a fish market where I had the biggest and best Oysters I have ever tasted.

栃木県中央公園 大洗