Obon

We spent 5 days down at the in-laws, well not quite, two of the days were spent travelling, it is a long trip and not one I enjoy since half of Japan is also travelling at the same time.

This is waiting for the shinkansen (bullet train) the ladies in pink are the cleaning crew. The train comes in, everyone gets off, the cleaning crew go in and do the whole train in about 5 minutes. They reverse all the seats - some trains do this automatically, so that everyone one is facing the right way when the train leaves and the train is left spotless for the next load of passengers.

The first full day there we went down to the beach, we went early and left just before lunch, which was just aswell considering how burnt I got, despite piling on layers of sun cream. Ebi-kun spent the rest of the week saying 'look, mommy is red, daddy is brown!' He really enjoyed the beach and swimming with daddy, he did drink a lot of the water and he said it tastes like nori (dried seaweed) :o) I am not a beach lover so just a morning there was enough for me.

The next day the three of us went to a local theme park/zoo. Most people seemed to be going for the water park but due to my glowing red skin we decided to give that a miss. The theme park is quite old, it probably had it's hay-day back in the 60's but it was about the right size for our needs. They have a few animals, giraffe, lions, tigers, bears etc.

and some small rides

Ebi-kun's favourite bit was the dolphin show

pretending to be a giant tortoise

The last full day we had would usually have been spent at the family shrine, cleaning it and praying for those who have already passed away. This year though we stayed at home to meet my sister-in-law and two kids, Ebi-kun's Japanese cousins. They moved to China about a year and half ago so this is the first time we met baby Hana. It is also the first time the two boys have played together as such, Ebi-kun was too you to 'play together' last time we met.

baby Hana and the toy I made....

...which tastes as good as it looks!

Then the next day, it was back home, I don't think I will ever get used to these Japanese style, compact holidays, seriously - I could do with a week off!