Photo of the Day - 09 Aug 09

Flat Stanley and the Fu Lion

Shrine Guardians

 

An online acquaintance asked me to help out with his son's "Flat Stanley" project. For those of you unfamiliar with "Flat Stanley", it is a book about a boy named Stanley who is accidentally flattened and then is able to visit his friends by mailing himself to them. It's been used as the core of a letter-writing and cultural exchange program called The Flat Stanley Project, in which kids send photocopies of a "flat stanley" to people around the world and ask them to document the adventures of their "flat stanleys".

I completely missed that little Hunter's project involved documenting food around the world, which is a real shame on my part because Japan certainly has some pretty interesting food. However, Stanley visited some places around Misawa, Japan, including a trip to see one of the local Shinto shrines. Here, Stanley has a photo taken with one of the shrine's stone guardian lions.

Photo of the Day - 28 July 09

Summer & Pat explore Hachinohe Park

Summer & Dad at Hachinohe Park

 

All weekend long, the Air Force weathercasters teased us with the notion that Monday would be clear. Since that was my (single) day off this week, we planned to go check out the Hachinohe Park & Children's Land. Of course, come the day itself, it was definitely threatening to rain. But we went anyway.

 

One of the things about driving using an atlas is that the atlas simply marks where the streets & roads are. It tells you nothing about the character of where you'll be driving -- and the map that I have is decidedly uninformative about the width of the road, too. So we drove through some highly entertaining portions of Hachinohe, including along what appeared to be Hachinohe's main city street. We'll definitely try to go back there before we leave; the street featured several interesting bronze statues of which I'd like to go back and get photos.

 

We arrived at the Hachinohe Park & Children's Land and, lo, it was closed (closed on Mondays). But we still got a chance to wander around before the rain really started coming down. Not pictured: the extensive small-scale amusement park (complete with ferris wheel, merry-go-round, and other fun stuff for children), the petting zoo, or the botanical gardens. That'll have to wait for a sunnier non-Monday-or-Tuesday-after-National-Holiday.