Jonas and Liz's Japanese Adventures: Harry 4th of July!

Well, folks, if your 4th of July has been even half as fun as ours then I know you've had a blast!! We really jam-packed as much as we could into 3 days and I'm about to tell you all about it!

But before I get to that, a (not so) quick rundown of what you missed last weekend...we headed to Ueno Zoo in Tokyo on Saturday. We have been venturing out more in our van (as opposed to the long and very often standing-room-only trains into Tokyo) and all of our recent family outings have gone well travelwise. J is the navigator and I usually do the driving, which is odd for us because J loves to drive but I kinda suck at navigating...and nobody is interested in getting lost in Japan, oddly enough. So anyway, last Saturday we piled in the van and headed to the Ueno Park area, our final destination being the Ueno Zoo. The park itself is very beautiful and the weather was just about perfect...slightly rainy but nothing too intense and about 72ish degrees...perfect for strolling! I tried not to include too many pictures since we have already posted a bunch from our trip last year...but since this time we had the kids with us, I picked a few of my favs from this trip. We found that the only real downside to driving into Tokyo is the parking....for about 3-1/2 hours of parking we paid roughly $30...so, prepare for that added expense. Also, prepare for the ATMs in the area to not take Mastercard...luckily the station one did, after at least one small heart attack for each of us while thinking our van was stuck in the 300 yen every 30 minutes parking space. So, take our advice and take plenty of yen for parking! Otherwise, everyone enjoyed the zoo...especially the ice cream (it really was awesome). Our family is filled with ice cream lovers so it is pretty much a prerequisite of any road trip or family outing. In fact, I think we are all starting to judge each area of Japan that we visit by it's ice cream first and then everything else. But hey, it's summer...and thankfully my knee is getting better so I can run off the endless ice cream calories. J says it was interesting to him to see Native American animals like buffalo and prairie dogs right next to exotic animals like polar bears. Animals that we take for granted. They also had dairy cows and the kids were asking why they were there and didn't realize that space is so limited here in Japan that many Japanese people have never seen a cow...or at least that's what we assumed. Anyway, it was a great weekend and a lovely trip to the zoo indeed. :) Please enjoy the zoo pics below as well as a few bonus Hinohara Waterfall pics from weekend before last!

Gorgeous waterfall @ Hinohara

Can you spot the moth?

Ueno Park promenade

Runch time ;)

I need a giraffe dress

We never did see the dhole...

Adorable kids!!

We also put together a Family Time Capsule this past Monday...included a couple of family pics (see below) and a bunch of other fun stuff: a few Japanese toys, US and Japanese money, a USB flash drive, a CD w/a family interview on it as well as Connor playing guitar, a lock of kitty's fur, a survey filled out by each family member about his/her current likes and life right now, a letter to ourselves in the future, and copies of everyone's IDs and a fact sheet of stuff for posterity (gas prices, what we pay for groceries, etc). It was really fun to put together and I can't wait to open it on July 1, 2038! :)

The kids wanted a pic with the pets...which is genius cause they will sadly not be around in 25 years

Family pic included in the time capsule

So, this brings us to July 4th...we spent a really fun day building cardboard boats and racing, checking out cake and pie cooking contests, walking around enjoying the festivities at the base celebration, jamming out to the Lt. Dan Band and then fireworks that night! The kids were so excited to enter the boat race and they had been practicing their boat design the night before even. It took them about 2 hours to construct and decorate a boat out of only 3 sheets of cardboard and one small roll of duct tape (not a full roll by any means)...as you can see below they had a great design and they took 2nd place in the 13-18 year old category and went home with a $100 gift card! We just enjoyed a lovely lunch at Chili's with their "winnins" this afternoon. :) The kids voted to have a family meal instead of splitting the winning money between them...how sweet is that?! They are such great kids. So anyway, after the boat race we enjoyed checking out and sampling the cakes and pies from the cooking contest...and 2 of our friends took home prizes as well, which was a fun bonus! Then we picked our spot and settled in to wait for the Lt. Dan Band to start. They were truly awesome, they played for almost 3 hours! They were even better than I expected and it was fun to be about 12 feet from a real life celebrity (Gary Sinise is the bass player, of course....wouldn't be much of a Lt. Dan Band w/o him). We enjoyed spending some time with a couple of our Japanese students that we signed on to watch the band and fireworks. It was a really fun day!

Epic Ashley face while chillin @ our friend's house making Smore's

Building the masterpiece!

I told J it wasn't patriotic enough so they had to throw a lil somethin' on there

Our pirate crew :)

The kids going fast...they made it across the pool in 1:16 :)

They lost 1st place by less than 10 seconds!! They did so great!

LOL so cute that she's like "it's still in one piece!"

Aww :)

Goofin' around at the kiddie go-karts

They are a lil big for those but who cares!

Gary Sinise aka Lt. Dan :)

The whole band...they rocked!

I figured Gary would be the lead singer, but he just played bass. The Gary Sinise Foundation has built 26 houses for wounded veterans (double and triple amputees) and has given over 130 free concerts to entertain the troops like us. Pretty awesome!!

That brings us to Friday, July 5th...and THE HARRY POTTER EXHIBITION in Tokyo!!!! Many thanks to my co-worker and good friend Masako for helping me buy the tickets because we literally could not have gone without her help! The exhibition is a travelling display of artifacts, costumes and huge set pieces from all of the Harry Potter movies! Needless to say, it was completely amazing and I found myself in a nearly complete nerd seizure at least twice. ;) Sadly, there were no pictures allowed inside the exhibition, but we did get lucky enough to purchase the picture below...which we thought came out really cute...and so did the exhibition people! They asked J for permission to use the picture as a display pic and said it would be on the wall in the gift shop! How cool is that? We're immortalized in our full Harry Potter glory now. ;) Anyway, the exhibition has only been to a few cities before Tokyo, so if you're an HP fan and it's coming to a city anywhere nearby...GO!! You won't be disappointed. We also took the kids to nearby Harajuku for them to experience the famous shopping district...it was surprisingly empty for a Friday evening but it was fun for us all to do a little touristy shopping. We were completely exhausted and my Fitbit told me I walked almost 25,000 steps so that kinda helps explain why. But it was a wonderful day in this amazing country.

On Saturday we loaded into the car and headed towards Kamakura. As with the Ueno Zoo, I tried to pick just a handful of pictures that included the kids this time around since you have all seen Kamakura before from our blog. The drive was very easy, but a tad long at just about 2 hours 20 minutes one way. Our first stop was the Great Buddha which the kids really liked. J and the kids even paid the extra 20 yen each to go inside the statue...which I was too chicken to do due to it being so hot and looking way too claustrophobic in there for my taste. After walking around the Buddha grounds and doing a bit of shopping, we headed over to, you guessed it, the ice cream stand near where we parked. J was looking for the famous Sweet Potato soft-serve that we got on our last Kamakura trip, but sadly we had to settle for vanilla instead (and J bravely got the vanilla/green tea twist which was blech to me but he enjoyed). Next we headed to Enoshima Island (about 15 minutes' drive away) and enjoyed walking on the dock along the shore...especially since it was about 90 degrees out so the occasional ocean spray was quite lovely and welcomed. We walked along the tiny streets and did some more shopping, as well as J and the kids climbing a few flights of stairs to view another famous shrine (I punked out and sat on the stairs at the bottom cause I was getting a tad over-heated). Connor stopped for a skewer of grilled baby octopus on the way back...and he ate both of them! So brave...but so nasty lol. This was the only time so far in our Japan trips that I have not been able to find a single thing that I would eat or that even looked remotely good...there were so many weird choices like the octopus, whole fish on a stick (that did not look yummy), fresh mussels, and other seafood that none of us were really interested in...and also a ton of different ramen places but with it being 90 out, nobody wanted that either. So we sort of skipped lunch and didn't end up eating until 4pm that day, which was not fun but we all had plenty of road trip snacks to keep us going. We ended our day with a dinner at 7-11 on the way home...perfect! The kids love eating there as much as we do, which sounds insane but you can't judge unless you've been to a Japanese 7-11 cause they're the bomb! The kids usually get rice balls (onigiri) and I always get this yummy teriyaki chicken and rice thing...while Connor usually gets inari sushi (rice wrapped in sweet tofu wrappers...delicious) and any other type of sushi that looks good. Like J said this weekend, it is so crazy that food that is not native to us and that we've only been eating for about a year can feel so much like home to us. He was speaking more specifically about Coco's Curry, but we would definitely put lunches from 7-11 in that category as well. We really love it here and count ourselves truly Blessed to be able to experience this wonderful place. Now we're just chilling watching the Harry Potter movies with the kids, after the Exhibition inspired them to re-watch them...and for the girls, they've never watched them at all! We hope this finds all our dear readers happy, healthy and cool this July 4th holiday. Love to all ya'll!