Mie Days 1 and 2 POSTED BY BOB

I forgot my camera for my first night of Tokyo because I was pretty destroyed, but there are pics on my brothers camera which will be coming soon. The second day in Japan we left to Nagoya, which is the third largest city in Japan. I do not know what this building is but it was the first thing that greeted me after a six hour bus trip.

For some reason Americans do not know how to eat a good pork chop. Here is the Japanese version that is deep fried and covered with delicious sauce. We got this somewhere in Nagoya and it was definitely one of the best pieces of meat that I have ever eaten. What sucks is that I am me and I get motion sick. So I was not feeling well after the bus trip to Nagoya so I only ate half of it. That makes me sad. I think me not feeling well had to do with the fact that we spend 5-6 hours doing Karoke the night before and did not get to bed until 4:00am and had to catch a 8:50 bus to Nagoya.

Later that day Jason and I made our way to Heizu, which is a small town in Mie Prefecture where our friend Fumika lives. This part of Japan has tons of rice fields everywhere. It seems like every available plot of land is used for rice fields here. It was pretty awesome just walking around her town.

Here is Fumika with the family dog Mu-Mu. That does not translate to anything. The dogs name is just Mu-Mu.

This is the room that Jason and I slept in while visiting Fumika. I sleep on a lot of bed mats in Japan. These were actually really comfortable. In the white book shelf is a whole of Naruto Manga for anyone that knows that cartoon.

This is a blurry picture of Fumika's parents garden in their backyard. That is basically all the backyard is, but they know how to use that space for maximum tranquility.

One of the best parts of staying with Fumika's parents was the fact that they cooked us awesome meals. The first picture is a traditional Japanese breakfast that consists of a piece of fish, some chicken with vegetables, miso soup and white rice. Very easy on the stomach. The second was the first dinner that we had. It was a lot of of awesome. It was mostly Tempura, which is delicious way of frying food. But there was also this silken tofu that felt like actual silk sliding down my throat.

This little guy is missing an ear, but is super cool. What makes it even cooler is the fact that Fumika's mom made it. At this point I will mention how awesome Fumika's parents are. They worked really hard all week only to have to put up with the Raish brothers. The are super nice and really made a huge effort to make our time at their house enjoyable.

The next day Jason and I decided that Fumika is the third Raish brother. The three Raish brothers spent the day at the beach where we were supposed to go clam digging, but just ended up digging holes.

At some point this little girl showed up to help us dig a hole. It was really cute and the mom was really nice.

For some reason I really like this picture of Fumika taking a picture of all the goodies we found on the beach.

We then had this awesome bbq on the beach. Even though we did not catch any clams we decided to have some clams and squid. The squid was super delicious and fresh squid grilled on on open fire is now one of my favorite meals.

We also got corn dogs at one point, which the Japanese call "America Dogs". We put some hot mustard on them and I got lucky that I got this picture just as the spicyness hit Fu-Fu's tongue.

After our day at the beach we went to an "onsen" which is a Japanese bath house. I obviously could not take pictures inside, but they are really big baths with lots of naked dudes in them.

The onsen was in this really small town, but for some reason they had these statues right at the train station. They were pretty big, and looked really out of place. Also bonus points for anyone that can name all three statues in the picture with a comment. Seriously if you, the reader, know the name of the middle statue that will help us settle a feud.

The rest of the town looked like this. A lot of rice fields and a few houses. It was awesome walking around here.

There was this really scary tunnel on one of the roads that we were walking down. On the other side it looked like it open up into a magical forest straight out of a Miyazaki film, but we will never know because we were all too scared to go into the tunnel. Seriously tunnels are scary for some reason.

After a long day Jason and Fu-Fu were all tired out, but it was definitely an awesome day.