We went to Tokyo Disney Sea last week with Clive and Angel; Chris, Adrianna and their little Sophia. Starting Sophia early to Chris and Adrianna's addition (Disney!) she got to go on a few rides, but always seemed a little more interested in making mom feed her :)

Tokyo Disney Sea is adjacent to Tokyo Disneyland which is in between our house and Tokyo. Last year I ventured with my friend Cristina to Disneyland where all the original rides are, but this time headed to the other park. It was a great day filled where we experience a little bit of Europe on a gondola ride, New York and the Tower of Terror, the wild west and Indiana Jones, Ali Baba (It's a small ride like 'It's a small world') and the Middle East, etc. Every night they do a big water and fireworks show which was quite spectacular considering they do it every night!

We ordered it on Amazon Japan and two days later it was on our doorstep! Our small camera that we used to take around with us has been slowly dying so we decided to splurge, yes before Christmas and get ourselves a new one...an extremely practical one!

This camera is the Olympus 790SW and is Shockproof (you can drop it), Waterproof ( you can bring it 10ft under the water!), Freezeproof (-10 degrees Celsius), Sandproof...you name this is one heck of a camera. While we still have our big Fuji camera that we lug around for the great shots, we'll now have one to take some great photos while out on the ski slopes, in the ocean, out on our bikes! Pretty exciting, just gotta learn how to use all the fun features now!

This year I was at an Elementary school teaching English for Halloween which was fun for all the kids as they laughed at me dressed up as a witch. Halloween is growing in Japan, but definitely nothing like the US. It was fun for the kids to get dressed up in costumes and I got a bunch of candy and chocolate to hand out to the little trick or treaters. I was there the day before and got a good measure of who wanted candy and who wanted chocolate. So I went to Costco and got a huge bad of Dum Dum suckers and then a couple bags of chocolates as it looked like it would be half and half. Well Halloween came around and when the kids came to trick or treat, they all wanted candy (dum dums), no one wanted the chocolate. Something was seriously wrong with these kids! Needless to say, I ran out of the suckers as I didn't bring enough, oh well...one day they will appreciate chocolate more ( the much more expensive of the two) :)

Nick and I pulled off the Sushi Costumes this year! Nick going as a delicous Tomago (egg) sushi and I as an Ebi (shrimp) sushi. And again we managed to buy our costumes all at the 100 yen store as well as win Clive and Angel's little costume contest! We originally bought these clear suit bags and were going to stuff ourselves silly with polyester that we got from the store, but Nick's allergies started to act up and decided that a pillow for the sushi was going to be much easier and avoid some sneezing!

At the party sushi (us), a Baker and his 'Bun in the Oven', Kids and their teddy bear, a Magic 8 Ball, Fall, a doctor, a devil, an 80's rocked out in Halloween style and "Julie" could all be seen roaming throughout the nite.

Check out the slideshow below and remember to look at FLICKR for all of our photos (although we still haven't gotten around to uploading them all)

On a very clear day, like a day after a typhoon has washed and blown all the clouds and pollution away, we can see Mt Fuji from across the bay. Here is a pic at sunset.


On the same day, we ventured into Shinjuku, the "center" of Tokyo. There is a free viewing platform and we took the following photo of Fuji again.


And other random city photos

This is not an isolated incident as I have seen around 10 separate, mainly old housewives, people doing this. So Japan recycles, Japan recycles aluminium cans. They put the cans out once a week and every morning before pick up, the old housewives squat beside the recycling bin and proceed to take off the bottle tops AND pull off the ring tab, the aluminium ring tab off the aluminium can... Do they just have nothing to do or are they so uptight that must take that frickin ring tab off??

...and that's my unravel of the Japanese society for today.