Last couple of days with Grandma

Grandma has been home for a few days now (enjoying her new kitchen, I'm sure :).  So, I'm a little slow getting this one out...

Last week we experienced our first "sushi-go-round" restaurant and were able to take Grandma to our favorite zoo.

Here is our first experience with kaiten sushi (conveyor-belt sushi, also known as sushi-go-round).  The kids (Kris included) were fascinated with the food moving by on its little track.  There were two tracks here.  The bottom track moved in an oval constantly.  The top track was for specially ordered food (chicken nuggets and fries for the kids, and Kris).  When you pull your sushi off the belt and eat it, you then get to drop the plate into a little slot on the table.  My guess is that it collected down there and then someone, or maybe a machine, counted them.  All plates were 100 Yen, except for a few special plates.  Every once in a while we would hear our plates down under the conveyor belt clinking together as if they were being counted.  There was also a game at this place.  We are absolutely clueless about how that worked.  Every few plates the monitor at our table would play a cartoon and one of those times the toy machine over the belts started moving and a toy fell out.

Getting his chicken off the special track on top

I think this was seared salmon with cheese on top

Obviously, shrimp

I think this was a seafood salad

Crab

Kris' bacon

Salmon roll.  This was hard for me.  It was really dry.

I think this was a beef "patty" for Kris

Sampler....salmon, shrimp, not sure what the pink was, and squid.
Joan had the squid and said it was very chewy.

Mackenzie's dessert

My dessert

I forget what this was.  potato, maybe?  Kris ate it.

Garytt's dessert

The Friday before Grandma left we took her to Ueno Zoo.  The kids say it's their favorite, but it's actually the only one we've been to so far.  So, I tend to learn new things with every adventure we have here.  This day's lesson:  leave earlier!  We didn't get out of the house until around 10, which means we didn't get to the zoo until almost 12.  This resulted in us only seeing the front half of the zoo.  The kids were terribly upset with me for not allowing enough time to show Grandma the whole zoo.  They were also upset because I refused to stand in the 20 deep lines to get a stuffed animal, so the walk to the train station was tear-filled.  Other lesson I should have already learned, but haven't....take extra batteries.  My camera died after half a dozen shots so most pictures were done with my phone.

He had his behind toward the window.
 I was lucky that he turned just enough for me to get the shot above.

I love getting shots of all the birds, but my camera is an
auto zoom and I can't figure out how to get it to see
past the bars consistently. 

This guy was scary looking!  

Trying to find the gorillas

There they are...sleeping

Also sleeping

Dhore....maybe.  I can't remember.  Mackenzie drew
a picture of it and I wrote it on the picture, but we can't
find the notebook now.

This is our favorite spot!

That's the big guy.  He would swim by so slow and most of the time he flipped over on his back.  

 The polar bear was out.  And he found a stick to play with!

Picking and eating bugs off each other.  

 It was a long day, even just doing half of the zoo.

Next time I'll have to see if we can get into the zoo through a different gate so we can start on the other side.  It was a beautiful day for the zoo.  Nice temperatures and just enough sun.