Honey, I shrunk the...

Every September there's a wonderful long weekend which has been nicknamed "Silver Week." It's a 5-day long weekend. After having lived this, I think everyplace should have at least one 5-day weekend. That, or all weekends should only be two days. It really makes life more fun. But I digress...

During our first long weekend in Japan, Giselle, came out to visit us. She had the whole week off from work and had a week filled with travels and adventures planned in our side of the country. Her first stop was to be at Onokoro Amusement Park on Awaji Island which is in our prefecture (Japanese version of a province). Since we were dying for some travels and adventures, we decided to go with her and her friends for the day.

There are two ways to get to Awaji Island. Driving along the Akashi-Kaikyō Bridge, the longest suspension bridge in the world, or hopping on one of the Tako Ferries (tako is Japanese for octopus) for about $3. Since we didn't have a car, or any real idea about what we were heading into, we took the ferry.

Now I've taken ferries many a times during my trips to BC. They were always very nice ships that moved at a pace comfortable enough that you couldn't feel the boat move, even though you knew it was. They were also very large ships complete with any amenity one could require.

This was not the case on the tako ferry. It was a smaller ship that moved incredibly fast along the ocean, and didn't seem to be the cleanest of vessels. At least it was only $3. The ferry got us to the island in about 30 minutes. And it's a good thing it didn't take longer than that. Moving at those speeds made me a bit sea sick. So I'm also grateful for the lack of amenities. The last thing I wanted on that boat was food.

Once we got to Awaji we had some adventure trying to figure out how to get Giselle and her friends to their hotel, and then how to get to the amusement park. While Giselle's friend did a great job at planning out the trip, this part seemed a bit under planned. I won't go into the boring details, but after a bit of trouble, we made it to our destination!

The big attraction of Onokoro is that they display miniaturized versions of some of the world's greatest monuments. So it's like going around the world in only a few hours.

The Great Wall of China

Rome

The displays were very detailed and amazing to look at. Everything was in Japanese, so it made it a little difficult for us to understand what we were looking at, but we had fun looking around and coming up with interesting photo ideas.

Giselle has affectionately nicknamed this pose: The honeymoon's over.

This pose is inspired by a level of Street Fighter. Kris has plans to alter the pic in order to make it look more like a screen shot from the popular game. Personally, I'm just really impressed with how high and straight Giselle got her leg.

Onokoro also had a fairy tale land exhibit that we had a blast in. Cause you know, we're children.

Samantha giving a hand to one of the three little pigs.

Giselle mugging Hansel

This is from a popular Japanese fairy tale about a monkey king.

Oh! And I saw my very first humming bird. Because of the coloring, we thought it was a really big bee, but when it stopped moving so much, we could tell that it was a bird. There seems to tbe quite a few of them in this area. Sorry the picture sucks, but it's really hard to take a good photo of a humming bird.

After a long day of walking around and causing havoc and having a bunch of small children point to us and proclaim "gaijin, gaijin!" it was time to go home. This time, Kris and I took a bus over the bridge. It was a nice sight (ran out of batteries by this point) since they light up the bridge at night. So glad we went and we may go again. This time, we have to conquer The World Village Amusement Park. You can milk cows there.