Emma turns 8!

Emma's special birthday surprise was going to.....Tokyo Disneyland! It was crazy. It was almost like the California Disneyland with Pirates of the Caribbean, Space Mountain, the Haunted Mansion and the Teacups - but not. Maybe it was the soy sauce and butter popcorn, the hot dog that looked like a hot dog but was not, the Mickey Mouse head-shaped pork buns, or the polite and plentiful bowing before every ride began. It was still fun. I just hope that Japanese everywhere aren't learning all their American history from there (Davey Crockett's canoes, Tom Sawyer rides, etc.)!

Emma and David with their furry friends... David kept petting him!

Sleeping Beauty's castle - even bigger than in Anaheim!

We actually went to Disneyland the day before her birthday and then spent her birthday at the hotel swimming pool. The pool backed up to a big Buddhist shrine so there was incense wafting over the whole afternoon which made it seem even more exotic.

We went out for a special sushi dinner that night as requested by Emma. The place we went to had a sushi bar with a conveyor belt moving around it. The chefs would just keep putting fresh plates of sushi on the belt and you could grab off whatever looked good. They were priced by plate color. The fancy part was that each plate had a microchip in it so they could keep track of how long each plate had been in circulation and take them off after a half-hour. When you were done, the waiter just moved his wand over the plate stack, which read the microchips in the plates to total your bill! Emma ate tons of salmon while David was just preoccupied keeping a running tally of our bill based on our plates. :)