March 23: Amy Gets Wet & Translator Trouble

One of the interesting things about this trip is the difficulty we've had with translators. Some of them are having trouble getting the information across - it's intersting that the best one so far was neither a native english nor native-japanese speaker.
Today's schedule was sponsored by the Bato-Ogawa Rotary and we met at the River-fish Aquarium. This was a fresh-water aquarium along one of the rivers in the area. An amazing building actually on part of the river and built to look like it is floating on the water. Terry got a kick out of seeing it - as did the rest of us. Lots of cool fish - and we took a lot of pictures. One of the best moments was when Amy was picking up a crawfish in the 'petting pool' and it snapped at her she jumped - dropped it back in the pool and got covered in water!
There was an Amazon exhibit where we saw huge fish - some as big as humans! We didn't get to learn too much about the place though - because our translator was one of the Rotarians who knew a little bit of english- but not really enough to translate to us! It didn't matter though - it was visual enough that we knew what was going on.
Our second location was the Hiroshige Art Museum. The exhibit there was all block wood paintings that were originally made for newspapers or books. Some really stunning works of art that were originally throw-away. Hard to imagine. Here too the translation was painful - we understood almost as much from the Japanese language as we did when the translator tried to tell us in english! I wanted to walk away and enjoy the museum for the beauty - but I didn't want the curator to be talking to only one person as two to three others were wandering around on their own having given up on the translation!
We finished up the trip in the gift shop where I finally picked up some postcards - yes - Mom & Dad I'm finally going to write!!! Terry once again got a bit forgetful leaving his sketch journal in the gift shop. By they way - if you ever have a chance you should take a look at some of his sketches - they are stunning!