Fall Summary : November

So for the most important November news...

We saw New Moon! For those of you who don't know this, I am a huge Twilight fan. The books are the literary equivilent of movie theater popcorn. Guity please reading with no nutritional value, I love them so much it's embarassing, and even though my inner feminist hates the message, hates the characters and hates the premise, I still love them. I thought the first movie was pretty bad, but loved New Moon, so much so that I have started to re-read the series eince the movie re-ignited my love for the books.

Yes that is my reflection in both those pictures, I took them with my cell phone.

This picture is of the escalators, they go up 5 floor, and our theater was on the 5th floor. It was awesome.

We also went to Nagoya, for some shopping and dinner, which was fun. Nagoya is a huge city and can be really crowded, so we try to schedule our trips for to avoid the crowded subways during prime hours. It can be scary crowded at times, at least for a small town kid like myself! So we try to avoid the biggest stations and busiest parts of town. Here are a few pictures from the same park we visited on our anniversary in June!

So that's it, we're officially updated on the past few months! Thanks for reading!

-Ruth and Tim

Fall Summary : October

In early October there was a typhoon!
 

Nobody here called it by any name but I guess it's name was Melor, and it was only a category 1 by the time it hit Japan. It landed not super close to here, but still close enough that we had crazy strong winds and all kinds of weird debris on our balcony, and some places around town lost power. Our power was fine all night, but the loud winds kept me awake and freaking out all night while Tim slept like a baby. It was frustrating for me not to be able to watch the news reports, or rather--not being able to understand the news reports, but there were no major problems, and Tim did his best to summarize the weather reports for me when they were over.

Our friends had a Halloween party, I suspect solely for our benefit, which is funny because Tim and I had never spent a Halloween together until we came to Japan since we were always working. It was a very fun night though, there was a huge meal and alot of candy for the kids, so I think everyone enjoyed themselves.

End of Summer summary

So it's been a while again! Sorry about that. It seems we go long periods of time where nothing new really happens, so it's hard to get motivated to write! I'm going to split this into a few different posts I think. This will be the end of summer summary.

Back in August, after our trip to Tokyo, we spent an afternoon at the beach, Irago Bay in Tahara- which is about an hour away down the pennisula from Toyohashi. It's hard to get there with public transportation, which is why we had never gone before even though it is by far the best place nearby to see the ocean. Anyway a friend offered to drive us down and have lunch in Tahara with us, so we were finally able to go!

This lighthouse is pretty famous.

So Tahara has a Toyota plant that manufactures Lexuses and some other Toyota cars, that we drove past and I didn't even think to take a picture as we were passing it even though it was HUGE and amazingly cool. We saw it again from the lookout tower we visited after the beach. Those windmills are surrounding the plant and everything in that area is the Toyota plant.  Our Japanese friends told us that they produce their own electricity to run the plant, which I thought was cool!

Anyway, this ship probably has cars in it. Which is awesome.

 There is no swimming allowed on this side of the peninsula due to dangerous undertow, so even though it was about 90 degrees that day, the closest anybody got was to stick their toes in. This is all the closer we got to the water.

That night when we got home I took a few pictures of the view from our apartment, since the clouds were pretty and it was clear enough to see the mountains.

The mountains look much more impressive in person, but this gives you an idea.

Okay that was summer! It was pretty great. Fall is next! 

Tokyo!

Hey everyone!

We went to Tokyo in July.







It was probably the hottest week of the year with temps in the upper 90s and VERY humid!


These trees are beautiful but as you can see they don't provide much shade!






So pretty!




The view across from the palace grounds is pretty cool! The palace grounds were about the only big open space that we saw the whole time we were there!





This cool shrine was actually not too far from our hotel.














I don't look too happy in this picture, but it's just because it's so hot!





Here's Tim with the empty sake jugs!





Another monkey!




More of the shrine!
















The view from the top of the shrine down the side entry.



Back up the same stairs.




That evening I stayed at the hotel with a headache and watched some American tv shows on Fox Japan while Tim went to Akihabara, the electronics district.



But by the time he got there most of the stores were closed already.... This is the only picture he got.




The next day we went to Yokohama which was really wonderful. The air on the ocean was really wonderful and it rained a good portion of the day which really helped with the heat and humidity.






























After hanging out at the boardwalk for a while we went to China Town!






















After China Town we headed back to the pier to see the city lights at night before catching the train back to our hotel.













We went a few other places later in the week, a few historic sites and the Tokyo National Museum.

















We took the bullet train home and saw something cool... MOUNT FUJI! It's behind those clouds... but it looked pretty impressive in person, even though this is a pretty bad picture!





Hope you all enjoyed the pictures!