Winding down to the last week of visiting my folks in Ohio, I'm starting to think about the long flight back to Kyoto.

On the way over, we flew out of Osaka via Tokyo and Chicago. Flying into Tokyo's Narita International is likely a surprise to anyone who hasn't done it before... Tokyo is the world's most populous urban area, so one might envision skyscrapers and concrete, but flying into Tokyo is all about rice fields.

The approach into Narita doesn't exhibit the concrete jungle of Tokyo because it's about a thousand miles outside of Tokyo (well, 35 miles).

While we've been on our trip to The States, Anthony heard that Mommy had progressed to a new level in her ballet dancing, so he wanted to send her a letter to congratulate her...

Anthony can write Hiragana fine (one of the three Japanese scripts), but he can't yet write kanji ("Chinese characters") except his name, so I wrote the address and had him copy it. It's not a good idea to do this very much, because the order that the strokes of each character are written is very important, so no experience is better than untrained experience. But doing [...]

Well, no, not any kind of business like the KidZania play spot in Japan that I've posted much about, but perhaps even better: Grandma and Grandpa's place in Ohio.

Anthony generally spends the summer at my folks' place in rural Ohio, both to bolster his English ability, and, well, to be able to see Grandma and Grandpa. They live in the countryside, so it's always a great experience for him.

We arrived yesterday evening. Our luggage arrived this morning. It didn't take long before he was playing outside, power-washing some heavy machinery. The toy backhoe has been a recurrent theme [...]

In my previous post about our recent trip to Ishigaki Island in southern Japan, I mentioned that we'd taken a side trip to the small but nearby Taketomi Island. The trip involved a 15-minute ride in a boat similar to...

Anthony took the picture above likely due to the whale-themed boat in the center, but it turns out that we made an impromptu decision to see the coral in a glass-bottomed boat, so we ended up getting onto the boat shown at right, for a short trip out to some of the many coral beds....

All the color were muted [...]

This is #8 (and the final post) in a series on our visit to KidZania in Nishinomiya, Japan, where Anthony's day included working at a gas-station, banking, construction, driver's ed, journalism, and pilot training.

Having procured his driver's license earlier, he was still interested in renting a car so he could drive around a bit. Every time he'd tried before, there was a long line, but this time he was able to get in.

However, for reasons I didn't initially understand, he came back to us and said that he wanted to do something else. This was surprising, and it [...]