Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Golden Week 2011

This Golden Week, we managed to take a good break after all the work settling down.

It started with a visit to the nearby Shinagawa Aquarium, actually one day before Golden Week (GW) officially started.

The kid and his cousin were very excited at seeing all those fishes and marine mammals. They were running around from exhibit to exhibit, and were very drawn to the dolphin pool.

Next, we went to Karuizawa 軽井沢 with my sister-in-law and her family. It was the first time the two kids got to travel on the bullet train (aka Shinkansen 新幹線) and you can see how excited they were.

Once at Karuizawa, we went to the main reason of this trip: Toy Kingdom (おもちゃ王国)!


The kids got to sit on Thomas the Tank Engine. My son was sooooo excited, he pulled me back to get another ride.

And he got to play with Thomas again after that... we left him on his own for quite a while, he was lost in his own world with Thomas.

So you can imagine how tired he was after we got back to the hotel...

We took another trip to Nikko with my parents-in-law. There was a small river running through the hotel's compound.

From Nikko, we took a drive up to Ouchijuku 大内宿. On the way there, we enjoyed the scenery, with blooming sakura trees.

We also stopped at Tou no Hetsuri 塔のへつり, just before we reached Ouchijuku.

Ouchijuku is a small little hamlet used by samurai lords as a travel lodge in the past. The people here continue to maintain the old houses and it is a tourist spot now.


And the water flowing down from the mountains provide a way of keeping things cool... a natural refrigerator!

On the way back from Nikko, we stopped at Ashikaga Flower Park. The flowers were in full bloom.

There were many wisteria trees like this one...

And here's the son in his yukata!

Monday, May 02, 2011

Osama bin Laden is dead?

They say that Osama bin Laden is dead.

But does this mean the end of the war on terrorism? I don't think so, not by a mile. A war fueled by ideology is going to continue as long as the ideological principles it is based on continues to hold, and as long as people have differing views, terrorism will not end. So while some may celebrate the death of bin Laden, there is no real reason to bring out the champagne. And now that revenge is on the table, there is all the more cause for worry...