Parent Visit Part I: Tokyo

As Heather noted, we've taken a pretty long hiatus from doing blog posts, but we're trying to get back on the saddle.  Since my parents just finished visiting us, we thought this would be a good time to restart our blog, especially since it will allow my parents a chance to download the pics we took.

My parents came for about 2 weeks.  This was their first time to Japan and we wanted to give them a well-rounded experience with Japanese culture, both modern and old.

We started with a former royal garden, Hama Rikyu, and took the water taxi from there under Rainbow Bridge and to the modernistic Odaiba island.

Like most of Asia, food is a critical part of Japanese culture.  So we were sure to treat my parents to some great dishes, such as ramen, real sushi (sashimi), and yakiniku (which is Korean-style BBQ that is very popular all over Japan).  They loved the food, although some dishes were a bit harder for them to eat than others. :)

We also had the chance to go to the Studio Ghibli museum.  Studio Ghibli is the Japanese equivalent to Disney.  They have been making incredible animated movies since the 70s, and many have won major international awards.  As a family, we've enjoyed watching many of these classics, so it was a wonderful experience to visit the museum.  We showed 2-3 of the movies to my parents before the visit, and even with such little exposure, they loved the creativity and imagination evident all over this unique museum.

To highlight Japan's modern culture, I took my parents to Robot Restaurant.  It was definitely a colorful, cultural experience. 

We even got attacked by Godzilla at one point, which you would expect given that we are in Tokyo.

Here are my parents with our girls wearing their summer kimonos, or yukatas.

While they were here, we also celebrated the birthday of my most incredible, stupendous, fantastic wife.

The visit was timed perfectly to catch a sumo wrestling tournement. We had a great time watching very hefty men smash their bodies into one another wearing diapers and trying to throw/push their opponent out of the ring.  

Here we are at one of Tokyo's most atmospheric shrines, Meiji shrine.  Fortunately we saw about 2-3 weddings take place that day, which was fun to see because the whole wedding procession wears traditional Japanese clothing.

And of course, there was a lot of playing around at the house.  I'll do another post about our big trip to other cities outside of Tokyo.