A trip to Sano 2

Hello!

It was nice and warm in Tokyo today.
How was the weather in your area?

Let me continue to write about my trip to Sano-city.

After the temple visiting, we went to a crepe shop... more eating!

The owner of the shop seems to loooove the Beatles, especially John Lennon.
There were many pictures of the Beatles.

The inside of the shop was very cute.  It was very cozy to stay here.

Everyone ate one crepe... It was quite big.
My sister's daughter, Yuina, ate 2/3!

After the crepe shop, we went to the Sano Flower Park.
This park is very famous for 'Japanese wisterias'.

Although the main purple wisteria trellis wasn't blooming yet,
the small pink trellis were very beautiful.

Here is the main huge purple wisteria trellis.  Not yet... (ToT)
This must be very beautiful when it's blooming
(the best season was around May 10th this year... we were too early to visit).

Other flowers were also beautiful, so we really enjoyed staying there.

In the evening, the wisteria trellis were all lighted up.
This picture is around 6 pm.

This is around 7 pm.

After we left the park, we went to a restaurant.
We couldn't eat much because we were sooo full!

On the second day, my sister's family, my husband and I went to an outlet
shopping mall.

On the way to the mall, we found an interesting shop. 
Thi is sticked deep fried potatoes called 'Imo-Furai' in Japanese.

In each prefecture, there are some famous local foods in Japan.
I've never seen this Imo-Furai in Tokyo, and  this one of the local foods
same as Sano-Ramen noodles.  It was very good!

This is the end of my trip to Sano.  Mostly eating...
Thank you for reading!

A trip to Sano-city

Hello!

It has been such busy weeks for me from the end of April to last week
since my job has to do with education.

As I wrote a couple articles ago, students become new grades in April in Japan.
Students usually start new after school programs such as piano,
swimming, learning English, etc...
My job is correcting (checking) papers (7th graders English) at home.
I got many students this year, so had to correct many many papers every day!

Although I spent busy weeks, I went to 3 short trips.
Today, I am going to introduce my first trip to Sano,
where is a little northern part of Japan.
It takes about 2-3 hours by car from my apartment in Tokyo.

Sano city is in Tochigi prefecture:
http://diddlefinger.com/m/tochigiken/sanoshi/ (map)
(I hope you can see where the Sano city is...)
By Wiki, the city population is 124,001, and the total area is
356.07 km² (137.5 mile²).


The purpose of this trip was to see one of my old friend.
She got married and moved to this area three years ago.

There are some famous foods and places in Sano,
so she and her husband took us some of them.

First, Ramen noodles are famous here and there are many
Ramen noodle restaurants (about 200 shops in 137.5mile²!).

This is a quite famous Ramen shop called Ramen-Ogane.
Probably Ogane is the owner's last name.

The soup looked gold!
There are huge hams on top, so you can't see the noodls below... I'm sorry!

Also we ate Gyoza-dumplings: the ingredients are minced pork, cabbage, and
other veges.

After eating noodles, we went to a big Buddist temple called
Sano Yakuyoke-Taishi.

There was a big golden bell.

I will introduce more tomorrow!