Pictures

Yesterday, I spent the entire day running around trying to get all the paperwork together necessary to apply for a Visa for our China trip. Somehow running around when preparing to go on an adventure of a lifetime is more fun than frustrating.

Moving to Japan we were not able to take a vehicle with us, European overseas bases allow you to ship one car, but not Japan. So we sold one of our vehicles and put the other into storage. When we arrived we found that in Japan there are a number of taxes and fee associated with owning a vehicle and we decided to only purchase one. One vehicle for the entire family for four years. Luckily there is a shuttle bus which stops near my home every half an hour and takes me the three miles to the main part of the base. Sometimes I drive Jeff to work, sometimes he car pools, sometimes Jeff takes the bus and sometimes Lily and I take the bus. I haven't been on the bus since the first snow fall, standing outside in the cold doesn't sound fun to me. We have been having some warm weather, in the 40's and Lily needs to practice riding a bus for our big trip to China. So yesterday I found myself standing at the bus stop. Of course the temperature dropped to 20 and there was wind gusts in excess of 50 knotts. We were without our gloves or hats and quite chilly. A stranger actually stopped and offered us a ride. But, we took the bus and ended up having a blast.

We got off the bus at Jeff's office and picked him up. I guess he told me that I needed to bring our passports with me, but I swear he didn't anyways we had to drive all the way home, get the passports and then drive back to main base. Totally defeating the purpose of our bus ride. Along with passports we needed Visa pictures, we needed all this just to buy tickets for our trip. I have had this roll of film in the car for months now and since I was going to the photo shop I got my pictures developed, now I can show you Lily's Halloween costume.



I can show you a pictures of Thanksgiving dinner.







I posted the rest of the pictures on this roll of film over at flikr including pictures of our trip to the Tofu Factory and our grand adventure visiting the Japanese Monkeys in Wakinosawa Japan.