Minori and Shuji pose in front of this good luck wreath as U-chan looks on from the side

The bridge to Taga-taisha, a Shinto shrine in Taga, near Hikone.

When we got to Taga-taisha, a Japanese traditional wedding ceremony was just finishing.

Taga-taisha

The next place we went was Eigen-ji, a Buddhist temple. It is on a mountain side, so you have to climb up a bunch of stairs to get there. On the way up, we found this statue, we thought it was cute because not a lot of Buddhist statues have glasses on.

It's hard to make out due to the angle and the image quality, but there were a bunch of statues carved into the rock of the mountain.

Looking down on the river and some buildings on the other side. It was raining, by the way.

Nobody could figure out what this little structure was doing standing inside the temple grounds. I still wonder what they use it for.

Getting out of the rain ... to pose for photojournal!

A shot of the temple grounds.

The Eigen-ji temple bell.

This is a huge pot of ash. For 100 yen, you can burn a stick of incense in it. If you write on the incense with black marker, whatever you write will show up in the ash. Pretty cool!

This is my stick of incense. You can see I wrote a cute smiley face on it. I also wrote "safe airplane home", because I'm terrified of flying.

The people sitting under it give you an idea of how big this roof is... that's a lot of roof!

There was a pretty big range of buildings in Eigen-ji.

Another Eigenji building

On the way out, we found this really cool staircase up into the mountain.

Keiko and Shuji singing karaoke

Minori and I at the karaoke place

Finally, a picture with U-chan in it too ... this is also at the karaoke place.

It was a very Japanese style room.

Did someone call for ... DAY-O!!! yahoo!

The night got a little more interesting when I ran into Matt Sullivan, we tore it up in his karaoke room for a while.