Over a week after...

...a wonderful visit from my parents and aunt, I am finally getting around to recounting a bit of it, though briefly.

Some of the highlights and photos below.

1. Enjoying the wide scope of distinct flavors that is Japanese cuisine.



2. A evening at a Japanese professional baseball game. Sendai's own last-place Rakuten Eagles beat the first-place Hanshin Tigers 8-7 in 10 innings. A great game, and the baseball teams here have cheerleaders dressed in cowboy outfits.

3. Successfully communicating in Japanese to the train station officials, that my mother's shoe had fallen off while exiting the bullet train, and fallen between the train and the platform. After the train departed, they retrieved the shoe from the track with a grabber-on-a-long-pole.



4. A visit to the A-Bomb Memorial and Museum in Hiroshima. An extremely well done and sobering exhibit.




5. Nearly finishing off a plate of shabu-shabu that could have fed 8, with my father. Shabu-shabu is top grade beef, sliced very thin, and cooked for mere seconds in boiling water (along with an assortment of veggies) in a pot in the center of the table. With your chopsticks, you pick what you want from the pot, dip into a sesame or tare sauce, and then enjoy. My mother and aunt, not being big meat-eaters, left most of the beef to my father and me, much to our delight.

6. Many, many kilometers on the bullet train.



7. Visits to perhaps a dozen of the many thousands of temples, shrines, and gardens in this country, including Miyajima ("Shrine Island"), held to be one of the three most scenic views in Japan.

8. Schoolkids, both the numerous fieldtrip groups we encountered while sightseeing (many of whom asked for our autographs), and my own "groupies" (as my mother put it) at the school where I work, who were extremely excited to talk to my folks.



9. Fly-fishing with my dad, and catching our first fish (on a fly-rod at least) on the Asian continent.

10. Shopping in Naruko with my mom and aunt, and the chatty shopowner who pulled out stools and poured us green tea on the register counter.

11. And finally me, trying to explain, mostly unsuccessfully I think, the little that I know about this country and its people. A great part of having visitors is they observe through different eyes and have so many questions that I've never thought to ask...