Tsukuba-Dooba-Doo

July 4th weekend is special for everyone who lives in the States! It is a great times with friends, enjoying our freedom and watching fireworks. For Seth and I, it is also our anniversary, so we decided to do a weekend trip.  Seth has a Japanese language class till 8:00pm on Friday nights, so we headed out "early" 9:00am Saturday morning.

Seth and I have become the masters of public transportation, but it was a bit of a challenge to arrive where we wanted to go on Saturday.  To take the trains from Tsukuba to Awa-Kamogawa ( the station for Seaworld) should have taken 2 1/2 hours, but we did not arrive until 2pm....which was 2 1/2 hours more than what it should have taken!  What happened one might ask?  Well it was a struggle with getting on four different train lines and not knowing about rapid trains (everything is in Japanese with no English subtitles) and we also had a train break down on us!

Luckily  all we really wanted to do was hang out and spend time together.  The whole traveling time we would just laugh about what was the next obstacle (ninjas, tsunamis) would come in our way. Once at Seaworld we enjoyed three shows: killer whales, sea-lions, beluga whales, and of course all of the exhibits.


In leaving Seaworld, we picked up our public transportation pride and did much better getting to our hotel. We still had a little obstacle by getting dropped off at the wrong hotel by our taxi driver, but we figured it out and we were ready to rest our feet and eat some dinner!  Here is some more pictures of the Japanese hotel that we stayed in and our day on the beach.





At the beach we realized that we were the only people not surfing and not wearing a wet suit. It was funny but also awkward because everyone was staring at Seth and his awesome body boarding skills!!!

We hope that everyone reading this had a great 4th of July celebrating our countries freedom and the ones that give/risk their lives to keep us free!

   ~Kate