One night layovers are fun!

Our trip involved a layover in Tokyo anyway, so we added a night and spent some time in Tokyo. Cowgirl was very fascinated by all the different memorials and how they are decorated and how there's a little donation box for your favorite personage. We also tried some street foods and stayed in a lovely Ryokan, which is a traditional style inn called Homeikan Ryokan. On our way to the Ryokan, Mom accidentally left her camera in the taxi, and the taxi driver actually got out of his taxi and ran to give it to us since the Ryokan wasn't on a car accessible street. It was so very representative of the honesty of the Japanese people. They'll go out of their way to be honest.

Bibs on these statues. Not sure why.

This statue has clothes.

This is some version of a lollypop, freshly made with a piece of fruit inside, with a crunchy little cup to eat. Very sticky and sweet.

The Ryokan was gorgeous. The bathroom is a typical communal one, and really nice, but of course we didn't bring our camera down. We had breakfast in the room in traditional style, although I forgot to take pictures then. Probably my mom did, she had the camera out all the time.

Entryway to our room.

Hallway outside our room

 Our flight out was a late flight, departing around 11pm, so we had a full day. It was cold though, and I had to layer all the clothes I had, since I was going from a warmish climate to a warmish climate with a single day in a coldish climate.

This little hanging toy was something we bought out of a vending machine. There are vending machines everywhere. Street corners had drink vending machines, for both cold and hot drinks. What you can't see very well is that the little girl has a cigarette in her hand. I couldn't believe it. Kids toys representing smoking so casually. I didn't want to make a big deal out of it, and later on we managed to lose the thing anyway.

Airplane food never looks this nice in the US!

On our way to Vietnam but stopping in Japan

It's nice to be small enough to sleep across the seats in a plane

A Tokyo temple

Just wanted to make sure she doesn't fall off the railing

The absolute cleanest squat toilet we will be seeing on this trip.

Holy smoke, to purify temple goers.

Visiting Vietnam

We're going to visit Vietnam. This is the first time for my daughter and I, but unfortunately dear husband cannot take enough time off to go. It's amazing that it's taken me almost 40 years to go while she's only going to be 5. This will also be the first time my dad will have been back since he left as a teenager, so long ago. Mom went back last year by herself, and now wants us to all go but unfortunately my sister can't make it this time.

Drama Girl

This was such a dramatic picture I had to post it.

Ordering off the Internet - Vietnamese site

There are of course bookstores that sell vietnamese books on the internet. When I found this site Vinabook.com, I had to make an order. The only problem is that it is hard to decide on books online, especially when you're barely reading as I am. Google translate helps, but sometimes the translations leave much to be desired. It would be so much easier if I could just look at the books. Also, the shipping costs are pretty high, since books weigh a lot. The good thing is that the books are so much cheaper. So even with the high shipping, which essentially doubled the cost of the books, they were still cheaper than the bilingual books I was buying from Amazon. The other problem was that to make the shipping reasonable, I didn't use air mail but ship mail, so it took a while(maybe a month or so) before I received the books. You need to plan ahead at that rate!

Vietnamese Videos and piracy

I found a set of Vietnamese videos teaching the alphabet in cute songs. There are 2 videos covering A to R, and there should be one more for the remainder of the alphabet. I emailed the makers of the video set to ask about the last video. Their response was that there was so much copying of their videos that they were busy suing the stores and didn't have time or money to invest in new productions. Apparently the stores were copying and selling the videos in bulk. There were some things I didn't like about the videos in that they were not exclusively in Vietnamese, but they would throw English translations of the songs in some segments. Not only that, their English translations were not the best translations. I would rather teach one language well, than have two mixed up languages. But the amount of learning video is very limited, I haven't even seen any made in Vietnam. I guess it's not as common for kids to learn from videos as it is here in the US.

Ordering off the Internet - American sites

I'm finding bilingual books at a site called www.Asiaforkids.com. They have a bunch of stuff for most Asian cultures, not just books, but dolls, videos and all sorts of cultural things to help kids learn about their culture.

Some of the books can be found cheaper at Amazon, but they are a nice resource for finding a lot of stuff in one location.