Tuesday, August 1, 2006

The weather goes yucky again

I forgot that the other day we went by the Statue of Liberty Park. The Japanese have a mini statue of liberty facing ours. Mind you, this was just a drive by, so this is out of the window of the car. But you can see it has a lovely lake. The usual playground equipment, and near as I could tell, many walking paths. On the way out we passed a manhole cover. MaryBeth's mom is enchanted by the fact that each city has a different design for their manhole covers, so MB made me hop out of the car to get this photo of the cover.

MaryBeth is filled with joy since today is August 1st; otherwise known as the first day of the month that the children go back to school. We got up this morning and once again it was cold, clammy and misting. We joined the Protestant Women of the Church and headed out to another of Japan's many parks. MaryBeth took the lead. It turns out many of the protestant women drive quite slowly, so we pulled over at one point to let everyone catch up. I couldn't resist getting a photo of all of the flowers that lined the road.

The destination was Tonami Clan Park. It had a petting zoo, and replicated living conditions of the Tonami Clan which settled the area. So, I have finally seen the rice doors and the grass mats etc. If we wanted to, we could have pushed a button and heard all about the time period . . . in Japanese. oh well.

As you can tell, the goats were on very friendly terms with each other. These are two babies who spent most of their time chasing their mama trying to get a drink. Fun to explain to the children. Grace was heard to question the wisdom of calling it a petting zoo when the fences were too high for the animals to be pet (petted?).

On the way back, we stopped at a unique Japanese institution. The day hotel. That's right, pay by the hour kind of thing. Each door has a machine beside it so that you can pay for your hotel room without actually having to look a desk clerk in the eye. In addition notice to the right, you can park your car and hide it behind a curtain, so no one knows you be doing the wild thing in the middle of the day. Please also notice the bright pink cover over the window. Nobody can look in on you. Hmmmm.

We joined Mike for lunch at Burger King. Brock got the very cool pair of sunglasses Mike is wearing. They said superman on the back, so Grace and Mike are flying high.

We went to the library, checked out some books, returned to the house for a short while before Brock had basketball practice, and we started dinner. After dinner we had a rousing game of UNO.

5 comments:

  1. I am confused. Brock got the glasses so Mike and Grace are flying high? How does that work?

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  2. I hope you are happy Monica. Because I asked Brock how the beatles are, his mother told him to check for food, because he did that he opened the top and discovered it didn't smell so good, which made MB say perhaps we need to change the dirt (or whatever that stuff is), so now the beatles are in a bowl WITH NO FREAKING LID. I'm going to need therapy.

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  3. Wait, how am I responsible for the beatles? I don't know anything about the beatles. The only ones I know are a singing group out of England and the ones that eat up all the leaves on one of my plants out front.

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  4. Sorry - I'm the one who asked about the beatles.

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  5. So how hard is it to keep track of your sisters? There are only 2 of us.

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