What a wonderful trip...

... but it's good to head home. After a few days' rest, I'll update the blog with pictures and stories of my Japanese adventure. Thanks for your prayers. I sure am glad to be home.

Having trouble

Sumimasen! I'm having trouble uploading my pictures since every prompt and instruction on this computer is in Japanese characters! I'll get help, add my pictures, and get back to you soon. Thank you, I mean arigato, for reading my blog and sending me comments at the bottom of the posts. It makes me feel like you are right here with me!

A Nine-Story Bookstore

Every librarian loves a good bookstore. Well, this bookstore was nine stories high! The entire 8th floor was full of children's books. There are probably 10 or 12 librarians in our group of 160 educators, and several of us made ourselves at home sitting on the floor, pulling books off the shelves in this wonderful store. I can hardly wait to show you what I bought for our library! Do you think you could read The Very Hungry Caterpillar in Japanese?

Now that's a BIG fish!

Yep! I got up a 4 a.m. to go to the Tsukiji fish market, a wholesale place filled with tons of huge fresh fish and hundreds of buyers looking for the best fish, crabs, shrimp, eels, octopus, seaweed, and lots of other ocean products that I surely didn't recognize. I'm afraid I do recognize a live eel when I see one, and I saw lots of live ones in people's buckets tangled all around each other just waiting to be on someone's dinner plate that evening. I really enjoyed the tuna auction where some of the tuna were bigger than I am. You can see that, too, on the earlier blog entry about the Tsukiji fish market.

Gardens and more gardens

Miss Lucas and Mrs. Putnal would love this place. There are big gardens and little gardens and teeny, tiny gardens and gardens all sizes in between, many with little or big ponds filled with HUGE koi. Many of the same plants we have in Georgia are grown here. Since I can't remember how to spell correctly some of the plants found here and there is no dictionary to look up the spelling, I'll just abbreviate them, and you can pretend that you are on "Wheel of Fortune" and figure out the rest of the words: hydrang. azal. chrys. marig. peon. and many more whose names I don't know, but Miss Lucas or Mrs. Putnal could name every one!

Theatre performances

There are several types of theatre here. Some use masks or music; some are comedies or tragedies; some use puppets almost the size of real people. All types use MEN actors, many dressed and wearing make-up like women. You can't even tell that they're all men. We saw performances of all types, and Flat Stanley and Waddles insisted that I have their picture made with an actor.

It's a beautiful night in the neighborhood!

Tokyo is beautiful during the daytime. There are no graffiti and no trash. I even saw a city worker with a net scooping leaves out of small waterways. But at night...wow! Tokyo is lit up like Christmas!