Japan, Day 5: Adorable cakes and ninjutsu training

I was particularly tired for some reason this morning, so I slept in while Bobby went to more ninjutsu classes. Frankly, I don't know how he does it. I'm tired just thinking of how many hours he's spent training so far, and we're still here for a few more days. There was another sizable earthquake in the morning, and there were smaller tremors throughout the day, though not as scary as the one yesterday. Bobby came home from class and we went on a quest to find a scroll for Bobby to have the grandmaster paint the name of Bobby's dojo on. We didn't end up finding one, but we did find some nice boards for painting, so each of us got one so that we could ask Soke (pronounced soh-kay [that's kind of the grandmaster's nickname]) to paint us each a picture. Lots of people get stuff done by him, and while I'm here, I figure, why not? We need more stuff on our apartment walls anyway, and how cool would it be to have a personalized painting from Hatsumi Sensei? While we were out, we also indulged in another Japanese specialty: adorable desserts.

Cute cakes

More cute cakes

Even more cute cakes

Some of the most adorable ones

My cake

Bobby's cake

There's cherry filling!

They even wrap them nicely (they wrap just about everything you buy at a department store nicely)

Then we went to the grandmaster's class. I trained with one of the only three other girls visiting the honbu this week. I made sure to snag someone before class so that Bobby would have a chance to train with someone a bit closer to his level rather than being stuck with me. It worked out well for him, which I'm glad about. Again, the class went really fast and I didn't really get much out of it, but it was fun. When we took our break, Bobby and I lined up with our boards to get paintings done. I asked for a picture of a turtle, and Bobby asked for a picture of two samurai battling. They both came out nice, but Bobby's was not quite what he'd expected. Soke is well known for his sense of humor, so if you ask him to draw whatever he wants, it's probably going to be a naked lady or a cat with giant balls. Therefore, I was not surprised when instead of a serious picture, Bobby's was these little cartoon samurai and one of them had the bump on his head and the ouch face from being hit by the other one. I think that's hilarious, and Bobby liked his picture too.

My turtle

Bobby's samurai

After that, Bobby and I had supper at this nice little restaurant. It was one of the traditional ones where you had to take your shoes off and you sat on the raised part of the floor with a low table on these little mats. There wasn't a menu per se, but little paper signs all in Japanese (no pictures) hanging up around the walls of the restaurant with prices on them. I let Bobby order for us both in this instance. We got chicken on a stick and it was really good. When we asked the woman who presumably runs the place who was waiting on us to take our pictures, she was happy to, but only if we made the peace sign, which all Japanese people apparently have to make in just about every picture they take. It was funny. The people at this place were really nice. Kind of made me wish I did understand a little bit of Japanese.

Peace!