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Japan-day 2

Thursday, May 15th, 2008

Our second day in Japan we tried to go to a flea market since it was Sunday. I had heard they are great places to get cool Japanese stuff on the cheap. However, there was no flea market going on in the place it was supposed to be so we dejectedly headed over to the sumo stadium to buy tickets for the next week. Outside the sumo stadium there was a festival going on! There was music, food, young sumo wrestlers to talk to…we even participated in the traditional Japanese tea ceremony with instruction from the ladies at the temple to help us.

After the festival we then went around town and ate yummy sushi at one of those conveyor belt sushi places.

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The shrine at the sumo stadium.

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Dave with his head in one of those cardboard photo cutouts of sumo guys.

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Drummers at the festival.

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Me with a young sumo in training.

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One of the rediculasly huge electronics stores all lit up at night. Why don’t we have electronics stores like this? They make Best Buy look like Dollar General. Really, they have about 100,000 times the amount of stuff that can be found in any electronics store in the States. In this nation of consumers you think they’d give us some of the best stores…

Japan – day 1

Wednesday, May 14th, 2008

We are back from Japan, sorry I didn’t post while I was there but I decided to pack light and leave my laptop at home. It was an amazing and exciting trip, it seemed like we couldn’t turn around without seeing something very cool. The food was just as good as I imagined, possibly better. We had sushi several times, noodle dishes a few times and high-quality Japanese beef twice. Even if we just grabbed a quick bite at a roadside place or got stuff at the grocery store it was delicious. I took tons of pictures so I think I will have to break up the posts. I am going create a post for each day, almost as if I was actually posting while we were there.

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We visited the Hello Kitty store where I did some shopping.

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Next we visited a Shinto shrine, although most of the shrines/temples are both Shinto and Buddhist. These are sake barrels.

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This is the shrine gate. Steve and Dave are at the right side.

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I’m washing up at the shrine gate. It is traditional to wash your hands before entering.

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The inside of the shrine.

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Next we attended a baseball game! We sure had a big day our first day in Japan. This game is between the Swallows and the Giants.

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Here is one of the famous beer girls at the Japanese baseball games. They have mini-kegs on their backs and come fill your cup with fresh draft beer.

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Players