Day Eleven

May 11th

We had to leave Hakone today. It was a beautiful day, other than the wind was blowing. It had blown all night, so hopefully it meant for clear skies to see Mt. Fuji.

We drove around the lake, stopping at various spots for rest stops and to get different glimpses of Mt. Fuji. I got some pictures of Mt. Fuji along with other sights of Hakone. I noticed two "pirate ships" on Lake Ashi which I remember hearing about when Liz was here in Japan. We decided to not take the tour on the pirate ships and instead lazily headed around the lake and eventually back toward Tokyo and Kawasaki.

Ken and Miko took us to a shopping mall in Tokyo where we had lunch. This is an upscale kind of mall on several floors. This is the kind of place where it's best to "window shop," which is what we did before heading home to Kawasaki. We found a musk melon on sale for 10,000 yen which is almost $100! Can you believe it? We also saw about a dozen "American cherries" on sale for around 1,500 yen which is about $12. Let's see...that's about $1 for one cherry. Wow! Such a deal! We also saw cherries being sold individually, with each one individually wrapped. Incredible!

We relaxed the rest of the day at Ken and Miko's. Ken and I watched the New York Philharmonic perform on some of Ken's DVDs. Tomorrow we will be going to Tokyo to spend the weekend with some of mom and dad's other friends here. We won't be back at Ken and Miko's until Monday night.