Land of Godzilla 2

The rooms were much smaller than other hotels but the bathroom was awesome. The bidet is standard in all bathrooms with the water temperature at your control and convenience (you can see the controls on the right hand side of the toilet). I wish we had a bidet toilet at our home in Pittsburgh. There were also some cool squatter toilets in certain locations like some of the temples we visited. The third picture is of a typical street in Osaka.


Here outside the city of Fukui, I stayed in a hotel with a spectular view of the mountainous areas and architectural buildings of Japan. Rice patties dominate the low areas with tree covered mountains surrounding on all sides.

The Fukui Prefectural Museum is located close to the hotel and for obvious reasons is quite impressive. At a distance I thought it looked like a turtle shell but upon closer examination a football seems to better describe it. I met a fellow paleontologist while I was there and had some fun in the park area around the museum when not slaving away inside.


The food was amazing and quite different. Lunches consisted of eating in the museum from these wonderful lacquer boxes with a variety of food choices. I did get the hang of using chopsticks and tried everything at least once. We were invited to a dinner with other curators from the museum in which they tested us to see if we could eat whatever was placed in front of us. We sat around a low table with the paper wall partions separating us from other diners and had a typical male business dinner (Amy was the only woman). My favorite was teriyaki eel. I did try various types of sushi, sushimi, octopi, squid and various other sea creatures.