Today was another travel day. I went to Tokyo on the Sh?nan-Shinjuku line and my mom and Mrs. Kobayashi went on to Toyama to visit the Kawasakis.

Before we all left, we went to get ramen near Gunma University.

I got to Shinjuku and I just wasn’t ready to deal with the crowds. I hid in my hotel room and sounds like my sister and Lim were doing the same. I had three days of update to do on my blog, and also updates to software on my computer. The intarweb connection in this hotel seems a bit odd; plenty of bandwidth but trouble with DNS. I’m not sure what’s going on.

We all decided to go get dinner and I suggested going to the Odakyu building. I think all of the ladies from Gunma go to Odakyu and they’d mentioned the restaurants there. It wasn’t as busy as the Takashimaya building which is a good thing.

My sister and I got some sort of soba special. I can’t tell what the hell is in focus in this picture. I think the answer is NOTHING.

Lim got something else.

Everyone was taking pictures of their food.

As I was telling my sister, I think I’m just about done and need to go home. In Osaka I couldn’t remember when I was in my hotel room sometimes. Ah well, only two more weeks!

I believe I have a bazillion pictures of one temple today. We went driving around with Dr. and Mrs. Kobayashi. Dr. Kobayashi usually is busy and we don’t see him that often, but he took us to a temple and a museum of Tomohiro Hoshino’s watercolors.

I can’t remember the name of the temple, but it’s in Saitama Prefecture and just received the status of “National Treasure.” They repainted and regilded (I think) the carvings to replicate their original colors and they’re quite spectacular.

But before that, the traditional chrysanthemum displays of the season.

This is a picture of the outer gate. The roof is unique in the Kanto region. I think this is the gate from Yamaguchi Prefecture and there are more examples of the roofline there.

This is actually this inner gate is the first one we went to. This is the only picture I have of Mrs. Kobayashi, my mom, and Dr. Kobayashi.

This is a larger inner gate.

One of the temple guards in the inner gate. This guy was on the right side. The guy on the left side was being restored.

This is the temple itself.

If you pay extra, you can see the back side of the temple and get an explanatory tour.

The back is definitely something to see.

 The panels are all of gods playing.

This is the back.

And the inner side.

In the explanation of the paintings they talked about looking for the original paints for two years.

For lunch we went to a small shop next to the temple that was pretty busy and is probably going to get even busier. They had unagi and 

After that Dr. Kobayashi kept insisting that we go to the Tomihiro Hoshino museum. We followed the route the GPS suggested and I was asleep until we hit a dirt road. It didn’t seem like an actual dirt road, but a road under construction. After that we went down a windy mountain road that was barely wide enough for one car. We met two cars on the way and there were only inches to spare to get by. The road we were on was a prefectural route so now I know that prefectural routes can be goat paths.

Tomihiro Hoshino is a man who became quadriplegic and learned to write and draw using his mouth. He paints watercolors and writes poetry and that’s pretty darn impressive.

We went to a sushi & unagi restaurant in Takasaki for dinner. Usually you don’t see those together, especially not this good.

So that’s Day 45.

As I suspected, there wasn’t any intarwebs at our friends place in Maebashi, so I’m trying to catch up. Day 44 was a travel day. I was going to visit friends in Toyama, but they had several deaths in their family so they were understandably too busy. I ended up going to Maebashi to visit other friends and to meet up with my mom. At first I was just going to hang out in Tokyo, but this was an interesting option as well.

I tried to take some pictures from the Shinkansen but you can imagine that a train going 170mph isn’t going to let you take very good pictures out the window.

Here’s a picture of the tea fields of Shizuoka Prefecture. It’s usually rice paddies out the window but Shizuoka is different.

Here’s a picture of Mount Fuji from Shizuoka.

As we got closer to Mount Fuji, it got cloudier.

Ah well.

So it’s ¥4,900 to take the Shinkansen from Tokyo to Maebashi. It only cost me ¥1,680 on regular trains. The travel time is only about ½ hour more, but there are more connections to the Shinkansen. The further I got from Tokyo, the quicker my iPhone battery died, so I took a screen shot of the directions on Google maps and made it my background wallpaper.

My mom wasn’t scheduled to arrive until 9:20PM, so we had some time to kill. The first place we went was Costco!

There are a few differences. The light bulbs in my local Costco are all fluorescents. Here I only saw LED light bulbs.

They had the same huge meat packs and chickens and even had pre-made paella. The bread here is actually bigger.

I didn’t see the pre-made sushi, but this woman had it in her cart.

For dinner we went to a shabu-shabu restaurant that my sister told me about in the past.

Here’s the appetizers.

A sashimi course.

Some more fish.

The meat is frozen and sliced thin right to order.

After slicing it goes right back into the freezer.

Here’s the shabu-shabu!

I tried some local saké as well.

After the main course, you can get udon or zosui.

I took a picture of the owner in her beautiful kimono. Her husband recently passed away and was a classmate of Mrs. Kobayashi’s so they chatted about classmates and Uniqlo.

My mom arrived at 9:40, 30 minutes later than the schedule we had, but she’s fine. And that’s day 44.