Belated with a Good Excuse

First, for those of you who are faithful blog watchers, we want to apologize for being a week behind... we'll put the past two weeks into this posting.  Second... we have a good excuse... it was the first weekend of college football (which, thanks to our slingbox we were able to see a lot of) and we got to see the Yellow Jackets win... twice!

But, to recap the past two weekends, we visited a limited number of places since most of this weekend was spent receiving our shipment of household effects and attempting to find a place for everything.  The best part of our apartment is that we have a full china cabinet, yet no china... so it will become our place for "conversation" pieces as we collect them here in Japan.

The pictures below are just a few we snapped these past two weekends - a building that looks like the Beijing bird's nest architecture, a shot that just screams "you're in downtown Tokyo", a shrine we came across in the middle of an alley and squished between two high-rises, and finally... a car that is deceptively small.  We want to make sure you realize that while this van looks as large as a mini-van in the US, it's really only about 5 1/2 feet long and about 5 1/2 feet tall (yep, it's pretty much the size of a Nissan Cube... and just as ugly).  As you can see, it fits into a Japanese size parking spot (which is small to begin with) and it has room to spare.  I keep hearing threats that a certain someone is going to purchase a tiny box car (or even a vespa with a pizza delivery box on the back) and ship it back to the States for me when all is said and done.  I just hope one doesn't show up in our living room for Christmas... and yes, it would certainly fit in the living room.