Hi, Everyone!
The day after shichi-go-san, Bill-kun and Karin-chan both had full days of school. So their mommy and daddy took Grandma and Grandpa and me sightseeing. First, we went to Kappabashi street. That’s where all the stores that sell supplies for restaurants are located. One store had a really big supply of cookie cutters.I’ve never seen so many different designs before! Another store sells signs and advertising statues for restaurants. I made friends with a lobster and a pig chef there. Across the street, we found a store that just sells chopsticks. But the most interesting store was the plastic food store! Many Japanese restaurants advertise their menus by posting displays of plastic food outside their doors. This is the store where they buy those displays. Some of the plastic food looks good enough to eat!
After that, we walked to Asakusa, an old neighborhood in Tokyo that has shops set up around a Buddhist temple. It reminded me a lot of some of the streets in Bangkok. There’s a big bowl of burning incense, and breathing in the smoke is supposed to make you smarter. I tried it, but I don’t think it made any difference. Maybe it doesn’t work for lions, only people! There are LOTS of places to buy Japanese snacks at Asakusa, so I got to try some rice crackers and cookies. They were yummy!
From Asakusa, we took a train to Tokyo Tower. It reminds me of the Eiffel Tower in Paris, but it’s painted brighter colors. The tower was built to transmit radio signals, but now there are so many tall buildings in Tokyo that the signals are blocked. A new tower is being built that is twice as tall! But Tokyo Tower is tall enough for a little lion! I looked out the windows of the observation level to see Tokyo and the bay beyond, and I even looked down from the window in the floor. That was a little scary!
Right at the base of the tower is a very pretty restaurant where we all had dinner. The specialty of the restaurant is tofu, which is made from soybeans. They served the tofu in lots of different and interesting ways.
Wednesday was a national holiday (Labor Thanksgiving Day), so Bill-kun and Karin-chan didn’t have school. We all went for a picnic in Yoyogi Park. Bill-kun helped me climb a big statue, and Karin-chan helped me climb a tree. There were lots of people enjoying a sunny day. I was surprised that the roses in the rose garden were still in bloom in November! But when we got back to our hotel in Shinjuku, there were more Christmas decorations put up. Penguins are very popular Christmas decorations around Shinjuku’s Southern Terrace!
Wednesday was a Japanese thanksgiving holiday, and Thursday was the American Thanksgiving holiday. That’s the day we traveled back, so it was a very long day! Grandma and Grandpa and I took the train back to the airport all by ourselves. We’re good at trains, now! It’s a very nice train, with reserved seats in every car. And the luggage racks at the end of the cars have combination locks to keep your suitcases safe! The train’s last two stops are connected to the two terminals at Narita airport, so we could go right from the train to the departure area. We did stop to have lunch before we checked in, and we picked our meal from the plastic food outside! When we got on the plane, we found out it had a new entertainment system. I was able to watch The Lion King during the flight, and that made the trip go faster! Because we crossed the international date line from west to east, we actually landed in Washington DC two hours earlier, in local time, than when we left Tokyo! So we still had some Thanksgiving day left when we got back.
But even that wasn’t the end of our Thanksgiving! On Friday, we had our traditional Thanksgiving dinner with my best buddies Joe-san and Nancy-san. I helped Joe-san make sure the turkey was ready to eat, and after dinner Moose-san and I helped serve the apple pie and plum pudding. Everything was yummy! Then I shared some of the snacks we bought in Asakusa with Joe-san and Nancy-san, so they could taste them too. And on Saturday, Aunt Kara and Uncle Steven came over for dinner. We didn’t have turkey again, but I was thankful to have a chance to see them. So that was still Thanksgiving!
Now, we’re back at work putting the house back together. The painters finished their work while we were in Japan, and Grandma and Grandpa are busy putting furniture back in the rooms where it belongs! Bill-kun and Karin-chan are going to move into their new house in about a week. I wonder which house is going to be settled in first: theirs or Grandma and Grandpa’s?
Love,
Lion-san