Round 2

Some more pictures from Round 1...

After Round 1 we went to "UK" - a University of Kentucky Wildcats-themed restaurant. They had really good hamburgers; the only real hamburgers we've eaten in almost a year. They were really good. Really really good. I miss big pieces of beef. I want to eat a cow. Yum yum.

This is a shot of not even one half of one floor at the five-storey Round 1 complex. Towards the foreground on the left you can see a green oval with some guys sitting around it. That's a miniature horse track. Little mechanical horses run around the track while a big-screen at the head of the table shows an animated version of the same "race". You bet on whichever mechanical horse looks the fastest to you (actually it's a lot more in-depth > they have little "previews" of horses for the upcoming races on individual monitors, and then you bet on your favourite horse). I'm not totally sure how prizes work with things like this and pachinko, but somehow in the end it's not considered gambling.

So we knew that many things in Japan were small, but the domestic motorcycle market takes it a little too far...

Super-ultra-uber-high-tec photo booths are as Japanese as sushi and sumo. These things are so complex I won't even describe the whole process, but you do get to add all kinds of graphics and doo-dads to your pictures before you print them out (that's what Liz and Maki are doing). Some of the pre-fab English phrases that you can slap on there are great. "Sweet Romance," "Friends Forever," "Mystery Love" and stuff like that.

Maki's car has an alien theme. Since "gaijin" means "alien," we feel right at home. Japanese cars are often personalized in ways that NA cars are not - like with white shag dashboard covers and sparkley clear shifter knobs and 100 Winnie the Pooh bobble-heads.