Last week was “Golden Week” in Japan. That is a run of 3-4 holidays that usually land on the same week, and on unlucky years, span some of the weekend. It usually is the time in Japan when everyone in the country takes time off of work and bundles the kids in the car then goes somewhere. The kids school is out, summer is just starting, and people want to get out and do something different.

In the Tanaka-Evans household we had some small travels. We’ll be going to America in July for my younger sister’s wedding in Montana, and likely hitting Glacier National Park, so until then we don’t plan on any expensive travel.

Three to four times a year (not every day) our family will get together and go to a nice sushi place. There is one place in particular in Sagami Ohno that the Tanakas like, since they used to live in the area and know the sushi chefs well. We went there on Monday, the opening holiday in the week long salvo. This year, Tuesday and Wednesday were work days, but Monday, Thursday, and Friday were national holidays. We took the train down to Sagami Ohno, visited the Paul Smith shop that Lisa really likes and chatted with the employees there, who all thought Alan was cute. Then we went on up to the Sushi place.

Alan was excited to be in a new environment, or maybe he was just happy that I was feeding him some milk. He didn’t seem to mind being surrounded by cold fish and beer. He did like his milk though.

This place is always interesting because of the variety of dishes that you can get there. We always start out with some Sashimi, but this trip out we also had some very good mushrooms stuffed with something (grilled, so served warm.) The Satsuma-age (fried fishcake) was also very nice. The grilled bamboo was also great. I didn’t take pictures of the sushi, but it was also excellent.

After that, I spent two days at work. On Thursday, two of Lisa’s friends (bridesmaids at our wedding!) stopped by for a visit. We had a nice time visiting, and Alan enjoyed being held by more people that didn’t have beards and made cute noises at him.

On May 5th, “Children’s Day”, some sort of day that boys are supposed to be celebrated (but maybe girls too?) it was a beautiful day (it had rained on Thursday and Friday) so we decided to take a little walk to a nearby park. This is the same park where we went for the Cherry Blossom viewing a while back. I didn’t notice then, but there is a building (a pumping station it sounds like) that has an elevator to the roof (4 stories up) and a roof garden. So we hung out there for a while. In a city with lots of roofs and few gardens, this roof garden concept is really cool. It was a cute little garden, and there were a few other families with their kids up there playing catch or just sitting in the shade.

That park is a pretty nice park. We wandered around it for a while. They have a nice bridge going across the canal, and in the park itself have a big open space for kids to run around in and skateboard on or something. They also have a kind of fountain that overflows and turns into a very shallow wading creek for the kids. I think we’ll be coming back to this park a lot as Alan grows up. It is only about a ten minute walk away.

Finally, we didn’t do much else (I was working from home a bit, but helping out with Alan a bit too) but Alan did manage to get his favorite panda toy stuck on his foot. I think he’s just trying to make sure he has a lot of foot dexterity for his upcoming career as a professional basketball player. You need to have good foundational basics you know!