May Day!

So it's not May Day anymore. But in the name of May Day, the day on which Ryan pulled a ring out of his pocket and I said, "how'd ya' get that?!?" before he had the chance to ask the big question, we went out to Makuhari on a date ^_^

I got dressed up in some new/old clothes and our first stop was a lunch buffet at a restaraunt called Ninniku (meaning "garlic"). It's basically a healthy buffet of many types of salads, fish, rice buckwheat noodles and other goodies. For dessert they served specialty breads with yummy jam, fruit, different types of beans in a red bean sauce and some other food that tasted like doughnuts made from steamed bread as far as we could guess.
Yay! I was excited to wear my new hat and skirt; you can't see my skirt here, but it's a very exciting and lovely flowy plaid ^_^



To bad there are no food pictures. How unlike Ryan! There's just a shot of this teensy coffee cup that he really liked.



We also found a Chiba prefecture manhole cover in great condition! Most of the manhole covers haven't been painted in a long time and therefore the paint is faded and chipped, but this one was protected from the elements by a bridge.


We stopped to enjoy the kids attentively watching a man tie Pink Panther balloons. The same ballon guy is there pretty often and is always a hit.


But we had never seen this guy with a monkey before!


For the last part of our date we revisted a very nice little Japanese garden in Makuhari 見浜園　(Mihamaen). Since the garden is just a short train ride from Toke it's one of the first Japanese gardens we could afford to tour when we arrived here in August of 2004. It has a lot of sentimental value to us.