Hey All,
Okay well I haven’t blogged in a few days because I’ve been busy as hell!!! Thursday and Friday consisted of more testing, programming, and preparation for shows. It was fun, and pretty cool. Jim thinks he'll have our robot ready for kickboxing in no time!! He wants to have it kick Azimo’s ass (Honda’s robot). Saturday we went to down town Toyota for the Koromo Matsuri festival. That was really cool!!!! People pull HUGE wooden floats around by hand, with several riders on top of it. The riders play music and throw tons of strips of paper with kanji (Japanese writing) on them out. The kanji states different proverbs of luck, fortune, and stuff like that! Then there are pushers, they steer the floats… We also walked around down town Toyota, and went to the stadium, a very cool place. It has a huge retractable roof, and was built for one of the world cup soccer games (unsure of which year). Afterwards we came back to the hotel and had a few drinks.
Then today (Sunday), I went to the Gifu Air Festival with Moriya-san, a co-worker here in Japan. David couldn’t go because he hurt is foot yesterday, and Jim had gone jogging and didn’t get back in time! The air show was cool as hell, but crowded; it was like swimming in a sea of people. Gifu is about 2 to 2.5 hours away from Toyota City. I met a couple of USMC pilots, who were really cool. They are stationed in Okinawa, and came to the air show to show off their fighter. One of the aerial acrobatic teams that performed is called Blue Impulse; they are very much like our Blue Angels, and just as good! Some of the maneuvers they pulled off were outright crazy, but cool as fuck! After the air show we went to eat at Denny’s (Yes Denny’s like the 500,000,000 million ones in the US). The food was good. I had spicy chicken Jambalaya, and a club sandwich with fries. Now the club sandwich was a bit different, instead of turkey it had chicken, and they add a hard fried egg to it, which is surprisingly good (coming from someone who only likes his eggs scrambled, as an omelet, or raw). After dinner Moriya-san dropped me off at the hotel, and well here I am writing the blog. Of course I also uploaded some pics (which you all made possible)!! Okay well it’s time for me to take a shower, and get ready to hit the hay, so you all have a great Sunday, and I’ll holler at you later.
Later Gators,
-Fred Jr.
