Hanshin Stadium Pictures

I wanted to send some pictures from our marathon bike ride on Saturday. I just read Rex's email and I can't believe he admitted to you all that I had the right directions to the mall!!! Unbelievable! But he's right - if we hadn't gotten lost we wouldn't have seen the Shrine. So it's good to get lost sometimes - if you can pedal that far! :)


By the way, the mall is very modern with lots of nice home decor and clothing shops. It also has an international food store. Lots of food from home and other countries - but very expensive. I saw a box of jiffy muffin mix, usually 3/$ at home. Here it was 357 yen - about $3.25 usd!!!! Most everything else was more normally expensive, but there is no rhyme or reason to how things are priced. Their clothes are awesome! Very interesting design. Jessie, Whittney and Tara you would love them! Great incentive for me to diet! At the home store I found lots of cool blank books and unusual envelopes, etc to try to stamp on so I'm happy.

Anyway, back to the shrine...
This is a shrine to the Hanshin Tigers baseball team. I was told that the players come to the shrine before games to ask for good luck to win. It is a typical Japanese shrine -sort of. Typically at shrines, they leave sake barrels in front (see pic) as an offering and usually have a place to write requests or thanks and hang them up. In this case, you can see "good wishes" to the team and the players requests to win hanging in the picture of Rex standing on "home base". To us it seemed funny to have a shrine to baseball -almost sacreligious! But they take it very seriously.

Enjoy! Next are pictures from Santo camp.
Chrissy