Well, after much toiling and angsting I have finally changed the design of my site. I'm glad it's done because I'll be leaving for Japan on Wednesday, March 25, and I'm supposed to sell my computer to my Dad this weekend. Look for even more posts soon.

These are some pictures that I took at Tony' birthday trip to the Japanese Restaurant Takara. It was a lot of fun and delicious as always. I wish I had gotten more shots of the Tone, but I was sitting at the opposite corner and my camera doesn't have the best zoom.

Takara and Tony

For Jason's birthday we all went to Casa de Lara, a nice Mexican Restaurant in Madison. Here are some of the pics of the before and after party. Heh.

Casa de Jason

I arrived at Narita International Airport on American Airlines at about 3:00 pm local time. The flight was quite nice, and they extra room the AA provides was really nice on such a long, 12 hour flight. The older woman that sat next to me on the plane was very ineresting. She had a lot of interesting opinions on culturs and language, intersting when I could hear what she was saying since she talked quietly and with an accent. With a masters in Linguistics and a librarian she was more then qualified to rant about and compliment various peoples. Heh. I enjoyed hearing what she had to say.

Well, time to wait for my plane to Fukuoka. Its kinda funny, my luggage has a big tag on that say "FUK." It makes me chuckle everytime I look at it. =P

I arrived in Fukuoka Friday night, March 26. It was pretty cool, on the flight to Fukuoka from Narita I got to sit in business class. =D Business class gets tons of room, and the chairs recline and have a bunch of controls on them. I was a little disappointed at how far back the chairs reclined though, I was expecting a Lazy Boy`ish seat where I could almost lay flat on my back, but that was not the case. The chairs reclined only slightly more than the coach seats, but the leg room was enough for me to lay on the floor if I had wanted to.

Fukuoka is the largest city on Kyushu, the Southern Island in the chain. Here is a pretty nice map of Japan. Yukiko and I were in Fukuoka for only a day, but we were able to do a little bit of site seeing. The cherry blossoms, called "sakura" are beginning to bloom, so we went to a sakura park to eat some lunch and look at the blossoms. Apparently the park that we went to, called "Nishi Kouen" (not sure of the meaning) is on the top 100 list of best sakura parks in Japan. After going to a park or two, Yukiko wanted to do some shopping for work cloths, so we went to Fukuoka`s shopping district where I became a human cloths hanger for a while.

Various Pics

In Nagasaki, I met Keiko, Yukiko`s mother, at their new apartment. She seems a very nice woman and I get a very relaxed, friendly feeling from her. She speaks no English and doesn`t seem to simplify her Japanese for me, but I get the gist of what she means, and she means well.

The pictures are from Fukuoka and from Nagasaki. One is the view from Yukiko`s and Keiko`s apartment on the 5th floor. The picture of Yukiko and I was taken at a new park that just opened on the harbor next to Dejima Wharf, for those who know where that is. =P