Japan 7

The next day, we rented lockers in the train station for our luggage, went to visit Nagoya Castle, had some AMAZING Tonkatsu and then traveled to Kyoto.  We stayed in a traditional Japanese style hotel.  All of us on the floor and with tatami mats and everything.  It ended up being a hotel where the Beatles had done a concert on the rooftop.  That was a pleasant surprise for me.  I love the Beatles and it was fun to hear them being played in the lobby all the time.  

This is one of the places that we took some time to give kids homework space.  I also did lots of laundry.

Jer and Grandpa found a shopping mall about a 20 minute walk from us.  We found some fun sushi for sale, milk shakes, a grocery store and most importantly for me.... a book store and a luggage store.  Seth broke the handle on his suitcase so that we couldn't put it down.  We couldn't fly like that and found a store with the cheapest prices that I'd seen yet.  We popped into the book store to get a japanese women's magazine for our neighbor, Kitty.  She was born there and she said that she only gets them when someone brings one back for her.  She was so happy when we dropped it off. 

I was full, but I thought that this spelling was amazing.  Sweet potat smootihe.

We found cat bread for Seth.

We stopped for ice cream.  Sam joined the picture as a joke.... he wanted to show that his dairy allergy wouldn't stop him.... hehehe.

These two got Ninja ice cream.  They were adorable.  They had mochi, a sword made from a pocky stick, and a cookie throwing star.

Grandpa said that this was probably his favorite historic thing that we did.  The artwork is really neat.  We went into the palace, but we couldn't go into the main building because of earthquake safety concerns.

These were ruins of a guard tower.  They gave Seth a minute to let off steam.  We had to try to keep him kind of quiet and not running around like crazy... so I was happy to give him a running minute when we were away from other people.

Ada was teasing me about being short because I didn't need to duck under any of the signs saying to watch your head.

This was my favorite part and we almost didn't see it.  Apparently the castle had been rebuilt from some pictures that had been taken shortly before the castle burned down.  They had some of the original glass negatives on display.  They were so cool!  I have some of my Grandpa Wilcox's glass negatives and I've always thought that they were pieces of art themselves.... not just negatives.