Marie and Tokio

Erik’s sister Marie and her husband came to see us on base. Tokio was AMAZED and excited to be in the U.S. For sightseeing, we went to the commissary and exchange and looked at all the American foods and products. We had Pizza Hut for lunch. Tokio said that next time he wants to bring a friend who’s never been outside of Japan to visit the U.S. by coming to the base. This amused Erik and I since the base is pretty small and ALL of the buildings are brown and tan.

Packaging

Everything in Japan is packaged nicely. Most items are individually packaged. When you go to a bakery, each bread item will get it’s own plastic bag and then all of those items are put into a bag. We recently went to a cookie shop and took some pictures of us unwrapping our goodies. First you have to take items from the plastic bag.

Then the cold item and cookies were separated into their own brown bags.

Inside the brown bag, each item was wrapped in a plastic bag. Notice each cookie has its own desiccant. Wow, that’s a lot of work if you’re really hungry!

Mt. Takao

It took us over an hour of fast paced climbing to get up Takao mountain. The mountain is 599 meters high (for those baffled by the system the rest of the world uses, that’s about 2000 ft). It was a beautiful hike as you can see by the pictures. After getting to what we thought was the top of the mountain we saw these stairs. It turns a corner and keeps going! The tiny white speck is a hiker.

If you notice in the pictures, I was not prepared for the hike. The Japanese hikers had appropriate gear including boots, walking sticks, backpacks, and headbands (I guess sweatbands). I had on my church dress and heeled sandals and had my plastic umbrella in hand. A girl’s gotta always look her best. Anyway, we had a great day and a great end to the day, i.e. a great dinner. The Japanese have a type of restaurant that is similar to Spanish tapas. You order several small dishes and share. It’s a good way to try different items. The chicken on a stick, yakitori, was very tasty. We should have taken pictures of the dishes; I’ll spare you a full description.

This is one of the views from the top of the mountain. It was too overcast to see Mt. Fuji. The mountain had many very old, large trees. They were impressive. Below is a statue of a tengu. I can’t remember exactly what they are (that’s what wikipedia is for if you’re interestedJ), but they were all over the mountain temple area.

Wrong Station Blessing

We had a great day. We visited a church in the morning. It was an American run church and, with the southern drawl, shouts of “amen,” and traditional hymnals, you’d never know (aside from the Japanese attendees) that you were in Japan. After the service, we wandered to a new train station, bought the appropriate tickets, and then got off at the wrong station (a station that only has trains coming through every 30-40 minutes). Oops. So, we decided to kill time and find air conditioning. We found a tiny restaurant next to the station that was built onto someone’s home. We ordered our food and as time passed we realized we were going to miss the next train and then have a 40-minute wait for the following one. Well, it ended up not being a problem at all. The food was so good. I asked the owner/cook what was in the salad dressing. After telling me, he disappeared into the kitchen for a few minutes. He returned with a small plastic bottle of freshly made dressing with two small ice packs all in a plastic bag! We sat and finished our food while watching TV with the owner. I then told Erik we probably should go because we had already stayed there a long time. As we got up to leave, the owner told us that we still had 25 minutes until the next train (we knew this) and that we could just wait with him. His wife told him it was going to storm later and they asked us with concern if we had umbrellas. With embarrassment, we said no, and he disappeared into the kitchen again. He returned with two plastic umbrellas. Please tell me if you’ve ever had a similar experience at a restaurant! We left so happy and not at all concerned that we spent over an hour at the wrong stop.