Japan (日本) Week 4

Friends and Family - I hope everybody is doing great.

Things are moving along in Japan with a lot of changes for the Sales force to digest.

This week I flew to the Kyushu area of Japan, which is the farthest south main part of Japan. There are a lot of rolling hills, mountains and rice fields here.

I was able to ride my first Shikansen (Bullet train) it was Awesome!

The Carmel corn while tasty, tasted nothing like Carmel corn. On the grill we are cooking Okonomiyaki, which is mostly cabbage with a little egg, shrimp, pork and squid in it - you cook it like a big pancake. Tasty!

While walking around this weekend I saw this happy Marshmallow Man, I don't know what he was selling - but I was buying. When I got to his snack stand, it was closed - bummer.

Also, visited a few other temple sites in Tokyo. They all have a place where they wash (pour water) in their hands. At one, there was a very cool Dragon fountain (and you know how I like Dragons).

Another interesting picture was of the little devil like guy eating - I need to ask my translator (Kazuyo) to tell me what it says, but I'm not sure I want to eat here? The guy could also be Gollum? I just thought it was interesting.

That also goes for the Alien like creature that is showing all his internal organs - Just and interesting thing in the middle of Shinjuku.

Probably on of the funniest things that happened to me this week was on Saturday, I decided to blow 1,000 Yen (about $13) and play some Pachinko in one of the 8 story parlors. The place was super noisy and smoky inside - so I thought I'd blow my Yen and get out of there in 5 min. I noticed a small house, that if I got a ball in there, the machine went crazy - It had a small steering wheel like handle that if I held about 80% on balls went in there frequently. After getting several ball in there, the machine got very noisy and lit up and with a Ninja movie in the middle and puppets popping out - It was so cool that I stopped playing and started taking pictures of the machine. One of the floor attendants came over and put my hand on the wheel and pointed to an area that I needed to get lots of balls in (which was full power and easy). He also started dumping my stockpile of balls into several baskets - when the mayhem was over, I told him I was finished and wanted to cash out (I actually had to tell 5 different guys several times - they really wanted me to keep playing. So they took me and those baskets of balls to a counter and the guys gave me 3 small gold chips (bars) I thought OK, weird - but golds OK. Then they took me outside to a cashier around the corner who I gave my gold too and she gave me $11,000 Yen ($135) - AWESOME, so I got 10x my money in like 5 min. - Total beginners luck, so since I'm ahead I won't be playing again. Well, I'm doing good and miss everybody - I'm really looking forward to Kathie's visit in 12 days!