Day 10 - 06/01/1998: Snow Topped: This day was pretty much a rest day for us as Ritsuko's brother went to work. We stayed in his house for most of the morning. The two boys were very hyperactive and it was hard to get away from them to get some peace and quiet, especially with all of the sliding walls, you can't hide for too long!
As lunch time came around we headed to a shopping mall, and I have not seen one like that in Japan ever since. Most shopping malls in Japan given the scarcity of land are in tall thin buildings, and the car parks (if there are any) are high rise. But this shopping mall although a few stories high had a lot of area on each floor and the car park was outdoor and covered a huge area. This shopping centre seemed to be in the middle of nowhere so maybe the land was cheep.
At this shopping mall I first tried Mr Donut. The donuts tasted quite different to the kind I am used to eating in Australia. They weren't so sweet and had a texture more like stale cake.
After that we went to Toys-R-Us. Toys are much cheaper in Japan than Australia and the cartridges for the Nintendo (remember this was 1998 when we still used cartridges) were about one third of the price in Australia.
I have mentioned on the previous day, I first saw snow on some mountains we passed on the way to Kyoto. When we got back from the shops it had just snowed on the mountains near by Ritsuko's brother's house which can be seen in the photo above.
It was very late and we were all already sleeping when Ritsuko's brother finally came home from work.
