Livin' the McDream: My Parents' Visit - Part 8

Today Keenan and I took my parents to Aomori, a large-ish city about an hour away, where we visited the Nebuta Warasse and Asamushi Aquarium. We finished up the day by having dinner at our favorite yakiniku restaurant back in Misawa.

The Nebuta Warasse is a museum dedicated to Aomori's huge and famous Nebuta Festival. The festival is held every year in August, but for anyone that misses it, the museum offers a year round chance to check it out. It's located right by Aomori Station and the ASPAM Building (Aomori Prefecture Sightseeing Products Mansion). The museum starts out with a section featuring the long history of the festival and pictures from past years. After learning about the festival, continue on and the museum opens up into a huge room filled with floats from the most recent festival and some hands on opportunities to learn about how they're made. The Nebuta Festival has been our favorite festival for 2 years running and it was great to show Mom and Dad a little bit about it. The floats take many months to build each year. The frames are made of wire (used to be bamboo) and then covered with rice paper and hand painted. They are so detailed and beautiful!

ASPAM Building.

Nebuta Warasse. Very unique building.

Apples are a famous product from Aomori Prefecture. We
HAD to try a fresh baked turnover...delish!

Random place deserving of a picture.

Next stop was Asamushi Aquarium on the outskirts of Aomori. This place has all sorts of fish and sea creatures, including some sad looking, moss covered sea turtles in a tiny tank outside. Overall the place wasn't bad, it's not nearly on par with a place like the Henry Doorly Zoo aquarium, it definitely needs some upkeep, but there are some creatures unique to this part of the world and the dolphin show was pretty entertaining.

At least these turtles had room to swim,
unlike the ones in the shallow tank outside...

A hands on portion of the exhibits.

A few clips from the show...

Yup an ice cream vending machine!

We sat at a red light for soooo long Dad finally got out
and went to push the button for a walk signal.

Houses.

For dinner we went to Kiminoya, a yakiniku restaurant in Misawa. It's one of our favorite places. We usually do the all you can eat for so much time option. Most of the food is brought to the table raw and then we cook it on the grill in the center of the table. Yakiniku is probably our favorite type of food here, we had to take my parents while they visited! I'm not sure if yakiniku was invented in Japan or if it's a variation on Korean barbecue, either way it's delicious. Food is eaten very soon after leaving the grill, it's just cooking and eating at whatever pace you choose. We usually have a two hour block of time. Each person gets a little dish for sauce but other than that there aren't plates except for what the food comes on. Large individual dinner plates don't really exist in traditional Japanese dining...