Miscellaneous sites in Japan

We spent the last day in Tokyo and went to the zoo. We were pretty disappointed with the zoo but they had some great birds. This is one of the most impressive looking ones.

There are vast numbers of vending machines in Japan. They sell everything: Cokes, juice, hot-coffee, beer, and cigarettes.

This is for my mom. Her name is Dori. Take note of the street sign.

This is how us non-Japanese can tell whether a restaurant is interesting or not. They have these plastic models outside so you can tell what they serve. On at least one occasion we had to take the waitress outside and point at the model to order.

We spent a lot of time shopping for a Kimono for Theresa. This was one of the first places we went. We were wandering around and came across this lady putting a Kimono on her younger worker. They didn't speak any English but they invited Theresa to try on the Obi (the wide belt that goes around a Kimono). Every one of the places we looked at Kimono's was very eager to pull out many varieties of material and frequently had a Kimono for Theresa to try on.

This is a cemetary in the middle of Nagano. Notice how close together they are laid out. There's also a cat sitting amidst the largest black headstone.

This is the front of the bullet train, which runs on the Shinkansen line. It's quite a fast and comfortable train. It cut the travel time from Tokyo to Nagano from about three hours to about one hour. A ticket costs about $60.

There are a lot of people, young and old, that get around in Japan by bicycle. This spot in front of a department store almost always has 50 or so bikes. In some places, we saw parking-lot sized areas packed with bicycles. Most of them are not locked either, since there is very little crime in Japan.

I didn't take this picture but it was important. This is a Japanes style toilet. Most of us were able to synchronize our needs with our time in places with American-style toilets, but I did hear some stories... This is a business card from a girl I met right after arriving in Japan. She was very pretty and quite friendly.