May 9 (Nara) and May 10 (Imabari)

We had a long day at WFT inspecting the reactor internals. The SGS engineers completed their inspection at about 6pm and by about 8pm almost all of their issues were fixed. There are still a few minor issues with the internals that need to be fixed, but the inspection went great.

Again, when I get the SGS photos, I will publish them. After the inspection, we gathered at the WFT shop for a final review of the issues and to meet with Mr. Yoshimura (the owner of WFT). He personally ensured that all of the action items were taken care of by the end of the day.

Mr. Yoshimura kept telling us to converse with his employees in English to help them learn! He is having them take English composition classes. It is a pretty helpless feeling trying to communicate with someone who does not know much English, but WFT employees did a great job getting their messages to us!

We all enjoyed our stay at the WFT shop. After the inspection we went to a traditional Japanese Sushi Bar. It did not have any chairs. We sat on pillows on the floor. We all figured out pretty quickly how not flexible we are.

This was my first experience with sushi as it was for JC and Thomas. Carl was an expert and tried everything along with JC. Thomas and I probably ate about half of the sushi. I will just say that I am glad that I tried it, and that it will probably not be my first choice in restaurants in the future. The raw fish finshed our meetings with WFT.

On Saturday morning, we awoke to some pretty good rain showers in Nara. We got up and decided to attempt to do a little shopping close to the hotel before we headed across Japan to the Sumitomo shop.

Everyone walking around the city uses umbrellas and we decided that we should use them to help us blend in with the locals.

Nara has a lot of neat shops in kind of an indoor/outdoor mall. We spent a couple of hours checking out the shops.

We each bought a few things. JC secured a nice gift for Brady. We are still looking for your Panasonic bulb (don't get your hopes up)!

I hope you enjoy these smokes, they have about 3 times the nicotine as normal American ones!

After shopping, we packed up our stuff and headed off to the train station to get a train to our next stop, Imabari. This town is about 4 hours south west of Nara and it is very close to the Sumitomo Heavy Industries fabrication shop.

Even getting tickets for the right trains was a challenge as we don't speak or read Japanese. Carl had some angst about which was the right train for us. The train maps and schedules are all in Japanese.

We eventually boarded the right train and started on our train trip across part of Japan. We had to switch trains twice. The trains here run exactly on time and you do not have any time to waste finding the right train.

We hauled our bags through several train stations and by late afternoon we had arrived in the city of Imabari, Japan. Our hotel is very nice.

After our train travels, we went to the hotel restaurant to have dinner. Here is a shot of what part of the dinner looked like. It is kind of hard to see, but this was prawns, scallops, and a crab leg. The chef cooked everything right in front of us.

The meal was outstanding and we were glad that we decided to eat at the hotel tonight. After dinner we picked up a bunch of information on the sites in and around Imabari.

Sunday we plan to venture out into the city and take in the sites. It poured rain all day today (which is why I don't have any decent pictures from the train trip) and we hope the rain stops tomorrow. Hopefully I will post some good pictures tomorrow.