Our Latest Adventures...

NEW FRIENDS AND FALSE ADVERTISING...
we made our way down near the osaka area to stay with our new friend who was a great host.  he took us up on a cable car into the mountains with a great view looking down over osaka and kobe.  then on a map of the mountain area it said there was a cheese castle so of course brent with his love of cheese and castles wanted to take a gander.  as we make our way closer to the "castle" we see it is now advertised as just a house, then once we get even closer it was given the name of a pavilion.  we had gone out of our way to see a PAVILION and that is pretty much all it was, a little shop with some cheese and dairy products.  such a let down, however brent did get some pretty good cheese and a huge class of milk.

view from mountain and our new friend

the disappointing cheese "castle"

A BLESSING IN DISGUISE...
so we finally made it to kyoto after getting on a wrong train which pushed us back a bit, but not a problem we had a fabulous day in kyoto despite our morning train issues.  kyoto was a fabulous place full of old temples and great sights (ELYSE... we must go when you get here).  when we arrived we went to put our backpacks in a locker, but they only had small ones left and brent's wouldn't fit, so he took out all of his stuff and carried around his backpack all day, which turned out to be a blessing!  it turns out kyoto is the place to buy amazing souvenirs and brent pretty much bought the place out (be excited if you are one of the lucky ones on his souvenir list :) ).  and without a backpack to fit everything in i don't know what we would have done.

IF ONY WE KNEW JAPANESE...
that evening we took a night train from osaka to kofu.  our japanese family we stayed with in tokyo purchased these tickets for us online because a lot of it was in japanese so it was a blessing to have them help us but it meant we couldn't understand anything our ticket said.  so...we boarded the bus around 10:45pm and were supposed to get off at 6am.  however we didn't know the bus made several other stops and because this was a night bus we were in and out of sleep most of the early morning so we couldn't understand or know when it was our turn to get off the bus.  when we woke up and it was past 6am i wondered but the bus was still full so at the next stop we asked the bus driver who just told us to go back to our seats as he didn't speak much english.  well we finally made it to another stop which in his little english informed us he would take us back in a van to kofu (as we were over an hour past our stop, whoops!) and someone else was there that took over the bus route.  so we finally made it to our destination with some incredible help from our bus driver!  oh the adventures in a foreign country when you can't understand the language!

WARM GREETINGS AND A BIT OF GHANA...
we made it to the yokomori's once again.  we stayed in mr. yokomori's hometown which was out in the country, surrounded by vineyards and mountains all around it was beautiful.  there was supposed to be an incredible view of mt. fuji as well but it was cloudy while we were there.  they also had two other japanese families come up for the day who also had all spent time in ghana.  each family had at least one ghana bag or wearing something from global mamas it was like a little taste of ghana right here in japan, it was wonderful to have the connection with these families made me really miss ghana.

THE JAPANESE KNOW HOW TO DO IT...
during our stay at the yokomori's we discovered some great japanese ways of doing things.  our first evening at the yokomori's we all had a bbq.  it was delicious a little bit of everything some vegetables, meat, octopus, etc.  but instead of one person manning the bbq everyone just kind of put there food on and watched it themselves brent and i decided it was a great way of having a bbq.  then today we all went fishing, did we go to a pond, lake, river, oh no we went to a pool filled with fish.  there were about four different pools FILLED, really this is the way to fish!  no waiting hours to catch a fish we were only there maybe an hour or so and brent caught 5 and every one of the little boys we were with caught at least one or more, it's a guaranteed way to catch something!  great idea!  takes the waiting out of fishing.

the fishing pools (guaranteed to catch a fish anytime)

now we are HOME, and i think both glad to be stationed in one area for a while, ready to start the normal routine of life here.