Shimoda Coast and Aquarium

Me and Daisy at a scenic lookout just before the town of Shimoda. You can see the white sandy beaches at Shimoda in the background.
It's a lovely place!

The last stop of fun in the sun this weekend, after a drive along the coast near the town of Shimoda (where there is a gorgeous white sand beach and water blue like Hawaii), was the Shimoda Floating Aquarium. Click HERE for a link. The website is in Japanese but they do have a PDF file you can take a look at in English. You can also just click around on the Japanese site to see pictures etc.

The aquarium is located at an inlet right on the ocean and makes use of the natural landscape and fresh seawater. Daisy was allowed to come in too but had to ride in her little trolley. It was way too hot for her to wait in the car!

There was a little shallow sea turtle pool as you approach the entrance. They are Japanese sea turtles but look very much like the Honu in Hawaii. It was really interesting as this pool has a low edge and you can get very very close to the turtles and get an amazing look at their faces as they come up for air.

First we saw a dolphin show. It was very minimal which I thought was nice as mostly the dolphins were not over trained to do a bunch of silly things that are not in their nature to do like many other dolphin shows you might see other places. Here, the dolphins just jumped and flapped around their tails and fins and swam close to where we could all see them as they were fed by the trainers. Daisy was totally fascinated having a look right at the edge. She really got excited when they would jump. I took a video of her watching them for a bit, it's pretty cute (IMO).

Daisy also got excited at the sea lion pool. When they would swim by close to the glass she was so shocked at first. I think it made her want to play and chase. But she stayed in her trolley like a very good girl and did not even bark. The sea lions also were not overly trained to do crazy things but one thing that was so cute was they were taught to pose at the glass for photos, either just holding still for a bit vertically and two were taught to put their noses together as if they were kissing. Adorable!

Two Sea Lions posing for a kiss! Enlarge to see their faces
(all photos on this blog can be enlarged twice).

We enjoyed sitting and watching various fishes and sea life in a large aquarium where it was air conditioned. They had some California Sea Lions, King Penguins and other smaller black Penguins as well. There is an area you can pay to feed and touch the dolphins as well as a program you can sign up to join the dolphins in the water a few times a day. That is my dream someday, to swim with dolphins!

Even though it was SO HOT that I wondered at times if we might get heat stroke, it was a fun day! It's a nice little aquarium if you get the chance to go there sometime.

Here is some video and pictures... Aloha

Poser!

There was even the cutest toilet paper in the restrooms!
Ken says they were selling this paper in the gift shop too... ha ha ha!

Daisy riding in her trolley, on the way back to the car.
This trolley is also helpful for when the street is too
blazing hot for doggie feet!

And here is a video of the dolphin show and Daisy having a good time watching. The crazy music they were playing and the annoucer's voice is alittle loud, you might want to turn down your volume before starting the video.

Orange Beach at Ito-City, Izu Peninsula

A wet Daisy at Orange Beach in Ito-City, Izu Peninsula.

Here is one of our adventures on our outing this past weekend. When first arrived that afternoon (to the area we would be staying overnight, in Ito), we stopped for lunch at a famous seafood restaurant chain in the area which also boasts a brewery. They had nice outdoor seating overlooking the harbor and it is dog friendly. Along the boardwalk there is very nice bench seating running the length of a running stream of water from the Onsen/hot springs (man made channeling of the hot springs water, sort of like an irrigation ditch type thing). People can stop there and for no charge, sit on the benches and rest their feet in the onsen water and take in the view.

A couple soaking their feet in the onsen water while a tour boat pulls out of the harbor.

Ken ordered an amazingly gorgeous sashimi rice bowl and I had a crab meat pizza (on thin whole wheat crust) with a glass of their own brewed light beer. It was really nice there except it was such a hot day, even though there were umbrellas over our tables, we were pretty hot...there was just no breeze at all that day.

Ken's photogenic lunch, Maguro (Ahi Tuna), Uni (Sea Urchin) and Ikura (Salmon Eggs) on top of steamed rice.

Next, being so incredibly HOT, we headed a few minutes back down the road to a nice beach we had seen. It is called Orange Beach. We could park easily and change into our suits in the restrooms there. The water is nice here as there are some jettys blocking wave action, which makes it seem like a big swimming pool. Easy to get in and wade or float around and there weren't any rocks on the bottom so easy on the feet too! The water was really clear and clean. We didn't care for the volcanic black sand, however it wasn't dirty or coarse, just not pleasing aesthetically.

We were all totally overheated, Daisy got straight in the water and was starting to sit down in it. We then took her out to about waist high depth (for us). That is as deep of water she has ever been in and she immediately starting dog paddling in the air as we held her. We then made her swim around a bit. She seemed alittle worried about it all at first but then relaxed as we held her and stood in the water cooling ourselves off. Maybe next time she gets to the beach she will want to swim on her own.

Daisy also had a blast zooming back and forth along the shoreline. She started feverishly digging a hole at one point and she got it deep enough to stick most of her head in and then bark down into the hole! It was so cute...she is such the entertainer.

Here are some pics and videos to share with you!

Daisy in the sea

Drying off in the sun and sand

Totally wiped out, she moved to the shade of our beach tent and crashed :)

Here are 2 short videos of Daisy swimming (and splashing).

Resort Pension BEAGLE, Ito-City, Izu Pennisula

Cute sign in front of the hotel

This past weekend we took a drive on the east side of the Izu Peninsula. It's about a 2 hour drive from Tokyo, if the traffic is light. Once you get to the peninsula, the road travels right along the coastline, near the shores and up on some amazing cliffs! There is so much greenery, at some locations we could have sworn we were in Hawaii!

We stayed in the city of Ito at a cute little dog friendly bed & breakfast hotel called "Resort Pension BEAGLE". The owners have their own beagle, a one year old girl named Nana. She wanted to play with Daisy soooo bad, but Daisy recently thinks she is too sophisticated for puppy games. Of course, any dogs, not just Beagle's are welcome!

The accommodations are comfortable and clean. There are gorgeous wood floors throughout. The location is atop the highest peak there and has an amazing view of the surrounding hills and the ocean far below. There are lots of pathways behind the building for hiking around in the forested area. They have a lovely deck in back with a large jacuzzi. It is such a peaceful place, we slept so well!

Dinner and breakfast are included in each night's stay. They served us a '5 star' meal for dinner, truly it was fantastic. Included was a small fillet of a local fresh fish called Kinmedai with some cooked vegetables in part of the menu. Also notable was the sashimi of Kinmedai and Shima Aji (translated in English as "Striped Jack Fish", normally found swimming in schools and are abundant in the southern part of Japan).

A photo of Kinmedai (Golden Eye Snapper), for reference, not from our meal! It has a very distinctive look because of its large eyes and its bright red skin, kind of reminds me of the Garibaldi in Catalina when my Dad would reel them in from the deep water so fast their eyes would bulge out!

Breakfast was also delicious and well planned out. It included of note, homemade hot just baked and super yummie rolls, plain, raisin and 'Yomogi' (Japanese Mugwort).

The husband and wife proprietors are very warm and gracious. We really enjoyed our stay.

Here are some pictures.

View of the building and parking area from the road.
Wow who's super nice Audi is that???

Daisy found the beds to be very comfortable.

Daisy and Nana, morning greeting in the lobby.

Our farewell photo in front of the building with Nana and our gracious 'hostess' (she really is a fantastic cook!)

How highway "Rest Areas" should be, Japan verison

In Japan, rest stops (or rest areas) off the highway are not the scary, dirty, dreaded places that they are in USA (to me anyway, stopping at a rest area in USA is a last resort for me). In Japan they are spotless due to ladies that are constantly attending to things and they are never out of toilet paper! *whew*

I took some photos on our trip from Tokyo to Osaka last week of one rest area (called a Parking Area/PA or Service Area/SA in Japan).

Some rest stops are pretty big with Mc Donald's and sit down type Japanese restaurants and 7-11 type stores. Some also have Starbucks but the ones that don't certainly have all the vending machines one could ever need. This machine offers pretty great coffee! You can select many types of coffees, sizes, black, sugar, cream etc. There is English under the Japanese so that helps for us foreigners!

Here are just some of the choices...after you choose, you can view your coffee being brewed on the TV screen. When I took this photo, the lid was being placed on the cup.

The cup then appears in the little door but don't take it out until you see the red lights completely lit up in the little bar next to the door!

And the restrooms themselves can be very interesting. Narration below each of the photos.

First thing you see at this particular rest room, is an electronic sign showing you which stalls are available and which are occupied, and what you will find in each one (Japanese style toilet, Western Style, etc). My husband tells me that this is not in the Men's room.

After consulting the sign board, you can proceed to the stall you want.

All the 'Western Style' toilets have heated toilet seats and controls for 2 kinds of 'bidet' washing and a button to push for the toilet to make a loud flushing sound without actually using water to flush (so that no one has to hear 'your business'). Some also have a button for blow drying!

Some restrooms have instructions on how to use the automated toilet seats. Now we can have the "Powerful Deoderizer" function defined!!! Whew....

Just incase you were wondering how use the toilet itself....

How to flush the toilet can be different in every place you go it seems, thankfully this one has things spelled out in Japanese, English, Chinese and Korean. However, some translation may still be necessary for some as normally we flush the toilet with water, not 'pour' it!

Mother's of young children will appreciate the child seats in some of the stalls. Some common sense warnings are posted, don't turn your back on your child to do your make-up, don't let the child crawl around and play on the seat, watch fingers and of course, don't let your baby smoke in these seats!

The lovely hand washing area.

This sink is all automated. Hold your hands in front of each place with markings and water (center), soap and warm air (to dry your hands) to make it run.

And last but not least, here is a brand new 65 inch plasma TV on the wall showing the current (up to the minute) traffic information for the major highways one might be thinking of taking. Boy if this TV was on a wall at a rest area in USA, I doubt it would remain there for long! Sad but true....

ALBA Golf Magazine - Daisy in July 2009 Issue

Me and Ken and Daisy Ipo at Kashimanomori Country Club for ALBA magazine July 2009 issue.

I just realized I forgot to put up a post on Daisy's photo shoot for ABLA Golf Magazine here in Japan. She was featured in the July 2009 issue for a spread they had on golf courses in Japan that accept dogs on the course. We had a fun time and Daisy was her usual photogenic self!

Enjoy the pics...

ALBA magazine photographers shooting Daisy on the golf cart.

Scanned from the magazine

Scanned from the magazine

Scanned from the magazine

Kashimanomori Country Club employees playing with Daisy while Ken and I enjoy the onsen after finishing golfing. The employees put this photo on Kashimanomori's blog.

Our Family Day at Funabashi Seaside Park - Tokyo Bay

Daisy playing with her ball at the beach

Near our home (less than 5 minutes in the car) is Funabashi Seaside Park, on the edge of Tokyo Bay. There is a grassy park, a community pool (that is opened only certain times of the year), tennis courts and some kiosk type stalls selling food/snacks and drinks as well as some toys and equipment for water and beach use. There are restrooms and fresh water showers/faucets that I sure enjoy rinsing off in before heading back to the car. There is adequate parking facilities (with a huge overflow parking lot just one block away) which costs a flat rate of ¥500. Very organized and well kept even though some of the buildings show their age.

Funabashi Seaside Park is basically a stretch of natural tidal shore that is very popular for annual clam-digging. The park authorities truck in roughly ten tons of clams, put them onto trawlers and then deposit them over the flats at high tide. When clam season opens, people show up (on some days in GREAT numbers) and after paying a small fee (a few hundred yen) they get a bucket, a shovel and an assigned a section of the beach to go dig their clams. It's great family fun. Many people also enjoy photography and birdwatching here. We saw many little hermit crabs and small fishes.

If you do wade out into the bay, take care because it is a haven for stingrays. There are signs that warn of their presence and it is not a joke. If you walk out onto the jetty walkway to the far left of the beach, you can look over the railings into the water and see them swimming around, in quite shallow water even. Some of them are pretty big!

Today we decided to have a family picnic with mom and enjoy the fresh air together. It was a beee-uuu-ti-ful day so we loaded up the car and drove down to the beach. It was Daisy's first time to the beach as an 'adult'. We took her to Makuhari Beach 2 times when she was a puppy and she wanted nothing to do with the water. She is also a little 'prissy' on her walks when it has rained, she avoids puddles and mud. So today I was shocked when she ran and jumped in the shore and wet sand and even the water! She had a blast!! It was so cute and fun to watch.

Here are some pics and then at the bottom, 3 videos of Daisy being a beach doggie!

A happy mouth full of sand after retrieving her ball several times

Me and mom and Daisy at our picnic site

Mom (in the middle of the pic) walking out in the tidelands

Ken, mom and Daisy...Queen Daisy gets the chair

What a nice day with family!

Another view of our picnic site, thanks to Ken for working so hard to get the umbrella up in the hard shoreline.

Flood in Chiba - Typhoon approaching Tokyo

A little movie I took as I walked from our apartment to the lobby.

There is a Typhoon (Hurricane) hitting Japan today. It is currently south of Tokyo and not expected to arrive here until tomorrow, and since a Typhoon's ultimate path is unpredictable, it is not sure yet if we will get a direct hit or not.

However, we are already getting rain and alot of it this morning. Our street flooded quite quickly (this is not usual, we don't get flooding on our street usually) and since the lobby of our building is street level (with no curb even) the water was flowing in.

Our building is constructed to accommodate a steel barrier that is put up to block water in such cases and hopefully avoid flooding of the first floor (we are on the first floor incidentally). So once we saw that it was getting bad outside in the garden, Ken went outside to check the lobby. Some other men from our building were there too and they all started to quickly put the barrier together. It are 4 steel panels that once put together, form the watertight barrier about knee high. Since the lobby was already flooded, after getting the barrier up they had to pump out the water with a machine we have for that. So nice to have the 'men' on guard!

The lobby is clear now (and the road has drained) and the rain has stopped, but I'm afraid it is only a sample of what we might expect here in the next 24 hours. Hopefully the storm will make a turn out to sea before it moves north more towards us!

Here are the pics from this morn...thought you'd all find them interesting... Click on the pictures to enlarge if you like...

Our lobby glass doors and our helpful men folk putting up the barrier. First row is up and they are beginning to set up the second row.

Second row of the barrier being put into place. Notice the water level outside the barrier, even just the first row of the barrier was starting to have an affect.

Barrier in place, time to start pumping water out of the lobby. Across the street (I mean 'river', ha ha) in the background, you can see our parking area, which thankfully is raised above street level, otherwise we might have been worrying about our car too! There's my super-hubbie working hard, standing on the outside of the barrier.

Our flooded street, taken thru the fence of our garden. If you look carefully, you can see the line painted on the road under water, just below that cement wall (there is a field on raised ground there that a neighbor owns and farms).

A van barreling down our flooded little street.

Rainbow in Tokyo

Rainbows in Shinjuku!

Today I saw this picture on the Japan Times website and thought I would share it on my blog. This photo is taken in Shinjuku area of Tokyo. The large rectangular building mainly houses the department store Takashimaya as well as the fun and interesting store called Tokyu Hands.

We had a rainbow here in Ichikawa recently (see previous post on the summer festival). I guess it's rainbow season!

A Japanese Neighorhood Festival

People from the neighborhood enjoying the afternoon.

In Japan, "Matsuri" is a word you hear alot. It means "Festival". There are many festivals throughout the year, most have a religious background (the most silly one for a foreigner is the "Naked Festival" (Hadaka Matsuri) where the male participants are dressed only in a kind of Japanese style loincloth, in some kind of purification ceremony taking place at Shinto shrines). Occasionally there are secular festivals, such as a neighborhood's summer festival. Yesterday our neighborhood (Baraki) held one called "Baraki Natsu Matsuri (Baraki's Summer Festival).

Some people from our apartment building (including my dear hubbie who got up at 6:00AM for this) prepared a little booth with games for kids. There was a small pool of water for them to fish out little Superballs and plastic fish toys using a paddle that had a paper screen. Whatever they'd managed to get before the paper screen broke, they could keep. One of the other games was a golf game. The golf ball and numbered screen was made with velcro, so if they got the golf ball to stick on the screen, they won a prize. All the games cost a 100 yen coin (which is about one US dollar). I helped take the money and pass out the paddles to the kids for the Superball game. Some of the kids were so cute and polite (all were very polite actually). When I would tell them "Do your best" in Japanese, some would smile so big, they were so excited to play the game! Later on, while I was waiting in line for something to drink at the drink booth, one of the girls who had played the game, came up to me and gave me one of her big Superballs for a present. I thought that was so sweet of her!

People from other apartments and homes in the area were responsible for some of the other booths, entertainment, food, drinks, shave ice and operations, etc.

While there, we ate some delicious fresh BBQ'd corn (Ken's favorite) and some yummie Yakisoba (stir fried Japanese Soba noodles with cabbage and thin sliced pork).

Ken got a kind of famous soda for kids. This soda makes all Japanese think of being a kid and summertime. When I saw the bottle for the first time (years ago) I couldn't figure it out! The glass is pinched at the neck of the bottle and I couldn't see how to open it. Ken had to show me how. Turns out, there is a glass marble blocking the opening at the top by the pressure of the soda bubbles. Once you POP the marble down (by applying fast and hard pressure) the soda is opened and you can start drinking. The marble is held in the neck of the bottle where the glass is pinched narrow. The marble rattles around and makes noise as you continue to drink. It's all a bunch of fun for kids. The soda tastes like 7-Up kinda. It's just a basic sugar flavored soda water Ken tells me.

Besides food and games, there was a band that played music for a bit, some older folks in the neighborhood sang some "enka" songs on the karaoke machine and a group of ladies performed some hula dancing. It was rather surreal for me to be sitting there, in Japan, surrounded by all things Japanese whilst listening to Hawaiian music and a hula show going on!

Although I was not really so enthused to drag myself out in the heat to a silly little festival in the dirt and gravel, it was a nice late afternoon/evening and I so enjoyed the little kids at the Superball game. We even had a rainbow appear (very rare around here) which put a smile on everyone's face!

Maybe you could join our festival next year!

The little side road on the way to the festival entrance, all lined up with bicycles.

The entrance to the festival.

Me watching some of the kids play the Superball game.

A view of the velcro Golf Ball game

Hula ladies

A close up of the marble inside the soda bottle, this was a bottle that was already empty.

Ken's soda just after being opened.

How the top of the bottle looks after the marble has been released.

A Baraki rainbow!