the beach and more!

We went to one of my favorite destinations in all of Ibaraki, Oarai!!! The picture to the left is o-toro, fatty tuna sushi...on a conveyer belt. We went to conveyer belt sushi again, however, this stuff is all premium sushi - because it is located in the fish market, everything is fresh and reasonably priced!

The middle picture is a pic of a manhole from the Nakaminato fish market. Nice, isn't it? A few people gave me odd looks while I took it but as usual, I did not mind. Something about my odd mannerism (wreaks of being a foreigner) turns people's heads around to stare at me. Ha ha. I don't know how to change it and bah, don't particularly care!

The last pic is of discarded oyster shells...people can eat raw oysters straight from the shell. Tempting but I have had my bouts of norovirus from it and preferred not to chance it.

Oarai was nice - the ocean was really dirty but it was pleasant to smell the salty sea air and hear the roaring waves crash along the coast. After that we went to a hot spring near Mito...I bathed in a rotemburo, an outdoor hot spring full of Victorian-age-like voluptuous ladies joking about their 3-dan (3 layer like stairs) bellies. What a riot it was. I felt asleep on and off in the bath...ahhh, paradise in a Japanese garden.