Bicycle Ride in Japan

First of all I apologize for slacking on my blog posts but we have been readjusting to our so-called Japanese life. My Japanese teacher says I forgot my Japanese in the two weeks that we where gone. I told her that I was till switching back from Spanish to English, let alone remember Japanese!!! The way I see it, since I don't know much I should be able to remember it soon!!!

On 5/19/07 Orlando and I joined a group of bicycle riding adventurers. The group headed east of Hiroshima to ride around a few small islands in the Seto inland sea. Since I have no idea what the islands are called I will refer to them as "Mystery Islands". Here is a map of our route:

In order to get to the islands we took a cute little boat ride as you can see:

Check out the view from the boat below. Japan or La Parguera in Puerto Rico? I guess it really is true when people say: "different island, same thing" (once again this is a family friendly blog), even if it is half way around the world.

I thought it was going to be a leisurely bike ride around the small islands, but it turned out to be a 25 mile bicycling route!!! The worst part was that in order to go from one island to the other you had to cross super high suspension bridges!!! HAAAAA the Horror!!!! Here are some of the bridges we took:
The picture above shows the Hakata Oshima bridge.

Here we are with our bikes (you could rent them there, my actual bike is only for carrying groceries) in the Tatara Ohashi Bridge.
Here is the Kurushima Kaikyo bridge which is the longest suspension bridge in the world. This was the last bridge in our route. At this point I could not feel any part of my lower body and my legs felt like jello!!! We stopped at a fresh fish BBQ restaurant right next to the bridge for some lunch. The interesting thing about this place is that they would literally kill the fish, sell it and place it on top of a small BBQ grill until it was cooked. The fish was sooooooooooo fresh that it was still moving!!! Yes the octopus tentacles where still moving in the plate!!! I took video of it to prove it:

For the record I did not eat this!!! It was in my friend's plate!!! The worst pat is that the tentacle was still moving on top of the BBQ!!! AHHHHHHHHHH This is one of the reasons I will always remember this day. The other reason is that I could not sit correctly for the next 3 days!!! So the moral of the story is: "Find out what your getting yourself into before signing up!!!".