Mt Fuji from our hotel window!

I know I signed off last night but look what we saw out of our hotel window this morning! After the rainy day yesterday, we were all thrilled to have experienced the sight of Mt Fuji. It is an awesome sight. We leave for the airport soon. Love you all!

Riding the Bullet Train

Most of you know that I love to ride trains. I always look forward to any train ride but this one was really special. It was so smooth and fast and it was just a fun experience. We didn't have any trouble at all navigating to get on this train. But when we got off that one, we had to navigate through the rush hour mass of people to get to the local train to get us to our Ikebukuro station. We had braced ourselves to be packed in like sardines but actually, most of us only had to stand for a station or two and then got a nice seat.
The navigating through the train stations was not easy on Jim but as he has done the entire trip, he pushed on through the pain and did it all. When we got back to the hotel, several of us decided to go to Subway several blocks away that one couple had found. So Jim stayed and rested and we were able to go and enjoy and bring him back some good old American food! We are all packed and ready to head home tomorrow. We don't have great seats but they could be a lot worse, too. We fly from Tokyo to San Francisco and then have about an hour and 45 minutes to get to our next flight on to Atlanta. We will be spending that night in the Wellsley hotel again, before Allen catches his flight on to DC and we drive on to Auburn. It has been a truly wonderful trip, full of all sorts of cultural surprises and insights and just plain fun. I don't think any of us will ever forget it but think all of us are also ready to get home, sleep in our own beds and eat what is for us, normal food! We leave for the airport about 11 AM tomorrow which is about bedtime for most of you. It is a 2 hour bus ride to the airport and then we have about a 3 hour wait before our plane leaves about 4PM Tokyo time, which is about 5AM your time, I think. So you can say a prayer for our safe journey and we look forward to being home and seeing you soon and telling you in person about our great adventures. Love to all.Madge

Boat ride on the Ashi lake

The misty day meant clouds hung low on the mountains and it was really pretty. We took a boat ride on the huge lake formed by the volcano's eruption years ago. It is a beautiful area and we all enjoyed it-we were the only people on the boat and it was fun to wander around and take photos and just stand and take in the vista.

Then we went on to a wooden craft place where they take paper thin pieces of wood that they have formed into intricate designs and make all sorts of crafts out of them. We had fun trying to open the 7 step secret box our Tour Director Yuko had. Allen mastered it in no time flat....Mom had to ask for help on the last two steps. The hydrangeas are blooming here and they are gorgeous-every shade of blue and pink and purple and ones like light blue centers and very dark blue edges on the lace cap type. A lot of the plants here are ones we see at home-including kudzu....

Hakone and Bullet Train

Well Mt Fuji was a no show today as we expected, but the day was still a great day. We went to Hakone and went to the museum there which has statues and is the area that has thermal springs,etc. So we all soaked our feet in the HOT springs and had a lot of fun doing it. These are our friends Brenda and Dick Tabor from Missouri who are with us. We ate our lunch at this museum which was a large buffet and was a nice place to eat. With the price of meals here, we were glad for an included meal in this optional tour. From the museum, we went to the bubbling sulfur smelling springs from the cauldron of the volcano eruption. They cook eggs in the water that turn brown and for every egg you eat, it is supposed to add 7 years to your life, but they didn't have any takers in our crowd.

Night time in Tokyo

This is the night view out of Allen's window. He has a better view than we do here. You can see the trains zipping each way at the different rail stations. It is an awesome view.
We started out tonight to find a place to eat Japanese food but the Japanese Steak house was $85 each so we decided our stomachs didn't want it that much (and neither did our pocketbooks!) Given that we can't walk too far for Jim's sake, we settled for a sandwich shop near the hotel which was pretty good. We then made a stop at the grocery store and bought a few snacks for our dessert. That should tide us over until we get home. Tomorrow is our big day for this leg of the trip. I don't imagine we will get even a glimpse of Mt Fuji but we will do the tour just in case. We will get to take the bullet train and ride on the lake that should have views of Mt Fuji. It will be a nice day regardless. All of us are winding down and ready to head home. It has truly been a fabulous trip but we are all tired. Japan feels very different from China and it is a more comfortable environment for us than China as far as day to day luxuries and all. It is nice to be able to brush our teeth with tap water and the fancy toilets are really much nicer than the ones that are holes in the floor! But it is definitely more expensive here. If we could get out of the hotel area, I think we could find more reasonable things, but we are not going to be here long enough for that.
This program director does not seem as experienced as some but she is trying hard. She has borrowed a wheelchair for us to use on the tours today which was really nice. We could not ask for much more than what GCT has done for us on this trip.
The third photo is us playing with the new stuff at the Sony center. If could find faces and put them into focus.
Well, time for bed so we will be rested for tomorrow. Hope all of you are well. Glad to hear we got some rain!

Tokyo City Tour

Well Tokyo is a big city but it is not as frantic feeling as Beijing or Shanghai. Even though we can't read the language, there are more English sub titles and directions. The traffic is nowhere near as bad as it was in either of the cities in China and much more orderly. We'd heard the subway was just packed, and I am sure it is at rush hour, but we went to the Sony Center after our tour and came back via subway and it was empty enough to get a seat. This surprised me. The underground city at Ikebuko (not correct spelling) which is our stop is just huge. Finding our way out was the most challenging part. On the way though we found a McDonalds which was a good lunch!

Let me start back at the beginning. The buffet breakfast is big and we enjoyed that. From here on out, that is our only furnished meal each day. We had a group dinner last night which was very good but most of us are ready to eat very light the rest of the way. We met at 9 and got on the bus and started our tour. The Program Director had borrowed a wheelchair for Jim which was a huge help. We went to the Buddist Temple and a smaller religious building nearly. We wafted the smoke that was supposed to heal things, toward Jim's back but it didn't work. Then we went to the Royal Palace which had beautiful gardens and it was a pretty sight. Then we went to the Tokyo Tower and went up to the observation deck. It was very pretty from up there. Guess on a clear day you can see Mt Fuji but the fog obscured it today. Then we drove to Ginza , the big shopping district like 5th Avenue and we got off there and went to the Sony building and had fun looking at all the new Sony products. With no English subtitles, a lot was lost on me, but I did manage to pick up a couple of brochures in English that I thought Robert might enjoy browsing. Then we took the red line back to our station but spent an hour probably trying to find the right exit for our hotel. It is just huge. If we were not so tired , it might be fun to go and shop some, but nothing is looking too great to us right now! You can tell it is at the end of the trip!

On to Tokyo!

We had a nice flight today to arrive at Tokyo after lunch. But let me start at the beginning. We had to get up about 4:45 to get ready to eat breakfast in the hotel dining room that they opened early for us. We all got up and on the bus and started out. We got about 15 min away from the airport when there was a huge huge traffic jam. We stopped stone still and everyone was out of their cars and we all saw our flights quickly leaving without us. However, after about 15 minutes, it broke up and we were able to get on to the airport. We had to get our luggage onto a luggage cart and get through customs and all those things and up to the ticket counter to get our boarding passes. We had asked for a wheelchair and it is just like being at Disney World. Once you get that, they put you to the front of the lines and open special lines for you and those with you. Jim's new brother "Dick" and his wife followed with us too and we quickly got the boarding passes, including the front seats with the leg rooms! So that part was nice. The flight was good-not much bumping and I slept a lot of the way on the 3 1/2 hour flight. Then we got through all the stuff at the end, again with Jim in wheelchair leading the way. We got on our bus and had to wait for a couple of couples who were on a different flight. It's nice that we get United miles for these flights as well. It takes 2 hours from the airport back to the hotel and I felt a bout of motion sickness kicking in about 30 mn into the flight. I was so very glad to get here to the hotel and be able to lie down, even if just briefly.

The hotel is very nice and our room is spacious and full of new discovery things. The one that everyone is talking about is the toilet in our room-we first saw them in the airport rest rooms. They play music, shower you with warm water from the bottom and all sorts of such things. We all agree, it is rather nice!
We are on the 15th floor and it is a great room. we just had a furnished dinner down in the restaurant and it had so much on the buffet plus they fixed me a pasta dish without the garlic and onion. The new Program Director is young and not nearly as detailed at Steven so we all miss him already. But she is trying and I think will do a good job for the couple of days we are here. It is hazy and drizzly here too. It is the rainy season in Japan so we are not expecting to actually see Mt Fuji or anything like that. But it will still be nice to see a little of the area here.
Didn't take photos today so will wait for some tomorrow to post.

This is at the Temple of Heaven as well. You can check Allen's blog for a photo of the Temple itself. Jim really walked a lot today but it was a good day and hopefully he can have a more restful day tomorrow. They are supposed to have a wheelchair at the airport. We fly out very early so have to get up about 4:45AM. I hope our hotel in Tokyo will have free internet as well as it has made it really easy to do this blog and all. So farewell, China, and on to Japan. What a trip!

Temple of Heaven

This is Allen standing on the center of the earth according to the Chinese emperor at the Temple of Heaven. We had such a good afternoon. A shuttle came and picked up a group of us to go to the pearl market. We had been given the names of two places that were reputable and I had a great time looking at the pearls and picking some out. The Temple of Heaven is directly across the street from the pearl market but it is like an 8 lane road. But fortunately they had a crossover pedestrian bridge so it was not a big problem except for Jim's walking. We just took it slow and got there just fine. It was a beautiful place-the grounds and the buildings were so vibrant and some ladies were dancing and a group singing on one of the long corridors. At the end of the afternoon, We felt we had gotten to all the things on our list of things to do in Beijing. We took a cab ride back to the hotel and fortunately, we got one of more tame taxi drivers so it didn't scare us to death.

We cleaned up and got ready for the goodbye dinner and it was a delicious western dinner. I had baked red snapper and it was served over rice and asparagus with hollandaise. It was really good. We said our goodbyes to our trip mates who are not going on to Tokyo. It is always hard to say goodbye as we have bonded and shared really good times, stories, books, jokes and feelings. We told our Program Director Steven how much we appreciated all he had done for us as he was just superb. We have depended on him and dread facing Tokyo without him. Hopefully, our new PD there will be a good one. It will be interesting to see how different the culture is. We know the pocketbook will feel the difference as things here are really reasonable.

The street cleaners at the zoo. It amazes me to see the manual labor done in the way it is here. These straw brooms are really neat to see.