With all of the traveling, we have not kept up with the Adventures of Edward Bear, so we will post a few updates this evening.

On Sunday, we traveled on the Aomori train to Hachinohe and the Shinkansen from Hachinohe too Ueno. Ueno is on the main Tokyo circle, so it is in a really, really big city. The first picture with this post is of a busy shopping area where Susan and Ted went to look around. Near the train station is a big park that has many famous museums in it. There are art museums, a science museum and the national museum of Japan. There is a zoo in the park, too. There are also several temples in the park. Susan and Ted visited one of the temples and bought their supper from vendors who were there. They had skewers with lots of crab meat and a roasted ear of corn. It had soy sauce on it and was served with a pair of chopsticks pushed up into one end, so you could hold the chopsticks and eat the corn off of the cob. For dessert, we had some little donuts. Each donut was shaped like a panda bear. There are lots of panda things in Ueno because the Zoo has two panda bears in it.

The man who sold the bear donuts made them right in front of us. He stood next to his fryer, which had a lot of hot oil, so his job was a really hot one. He first brushed oil onto metal molds. Then he poured the batter into the molds. Then he closed the top of the mold and turned it over so it was down in the hot oil. After a few minutes, he turned it over and used a chopstick to lift the bear donuts out of the mold. Here is a picture of him flicking the bears out of the mold.

The next day we went for a walk in the park. We saw lots of interesting things. One was a woman who could get the pigeons to land on here hand. She stood very quietly and still and they would fly into her hand and she would look at them. It was pretty fun to watch.

We also saw a woman and a girl who were blowing big bubbles for the children. They set their bubble making supplies next to a playground and made lots and lots of bubbles for children to chase and watch. They were really good at making bubbles. The girl made lots and lots of smaller bubbles and the woman made some really, really big ones.

After we had walked around the park, we had lunch in a cafe that was in the park and later got our suitcases and got ready to take a train to the airport and fly back to Vancouver, Washington, where Elliot, Emmala and Isaac came to meet our plane. We were excited to see them.

Our last day in Japan was a lot of fun!