What I have been up to

Been a while, blog,
So I better let you know what's up. Well I took a blog break because my sister and girlfriend came to hang out, and I got distracted. Oh, we did so much stuff. Here, look at the pictures of things that we did.

Liz and I went to Kochi castle, which might be one of the only castles in Japan that has the original castle building and the original gate. We got a private English tour by a forestry ranger government employee / tourguide volunteer named Yoshi, which was wonderful. He took this picture, and it will go down as the best picture ever taken in history.

close up of me and Kochi-Jo with me giving the traditional "thumbs up" gesture, indicating that I approve of Kochi-Jo.

We played pachinko, for the first time, a Japanese pasttime of gambling and gang-influenced profitability. I wasted 1000 yen on 250 little silver balls which disappeared very quickly. My hearing was forever damaged. But I learned a little something. Which is to never play pachinko ever again.

We took a ropeway car to the top of a mountain near my house and walked up a bunch of steps to get to this beautiful wooden structure. It is the front of a shrine, or a Buddhist temple, I can never tell. I think it's a shrine and the Buddhist part was off to the left. This was cool and there were weird big masks underneath the top part.

We walked to the top of an mountain, up 800 steps to take this photo at the shrine of the god of boats. They had a mirror so we snapped ourselves in it, then walked back down and counted the steps.

We even walked across kazura-bashi, which is a vine bridge in a desolate valley like an hour away from my house. Maybe you can see in this photo how those thin wooden planks are connected by vines and there is nothing between them, so you could easily drop a flip flip through into the river below if you are not careful. They key is to not look down but how else would you know where to put your feet? Just hold onto the side of the vine railing. They rebuild it every three years. This was the scariest part of my time here.

but we made it!

Sammy and I went to two baseball games in Osaka. We saw the Orix Buffaloes beat the Yokohama Bay Stars twice, 7-1 and 7-2. I ate this giant hot dog, which had ketchup, mustard, salsa, and mayo. It was really good.

We went to Nara to see the biggest buddha sculpture in the world, which is made out of metal,and this is me in front of one of his wooden demon protectors, i think. The building is also the largest wooden structure in the world, but it used to be much bigger, before it burned down and they rebuilt it.

My sister and I pretended to be little demon protector statues and do their poses in our matchins shirts at the top of that mountain with the ropeway. By now I hope you have realized that these photos are out of order. I didn't take any of these, I relied on Liz and Sammy to be the Souzas and Liebowitzes.

we all ate as much tasty food as possible, including sushi. Tuna, Eel, and Bacon with Mayo sushi are all represented in this photograph. Enjoy looking at it and wishing you were eating them with green tea, soy sauce, wasabi and pickled ginger.
Folks, those are all the pics I feel like searching out and posting right now. If you feel like it, there is a chance that my first installment of my new blog new games journalism is up. But you should really only click over to that if you are interested in reading about my experiences as I play videogames and try to learn about life from it. This might not be the last post of My Life in Japan if I get any special requests to talk about stuff you want me to talk about. Also if you want something from Japan when I get back home in three and a half weeks you gotta tell me and try to be as specific as possible.
Great!