On the first day of the tour, we saw several attractions. The first place that we went was Oyasuba Historical Park. This is a recently discovered tomb and a museum.
We were permitted to touch the pot in the photo above.
Below you can see a bracelet. The museum curator told us that this was the most precious item in the whole mound, and that it had been found in the coffin at the top of the mound.
After seeing the bracelet I noticed that there were visual references to it everywhere in the museum. In the photo above you can see that a photo to the left of me has the bracelet in it.
There was a projector set up so that you could pretend to hold the bracelet. What impressed me the most about it though was that the whole museum building was constructed in the shape of the bracelet. In a satellite photo you can see this especially well. link: here .
For lunch we got to go to a neat buffet restaurant. Fun Fact: レストラン means "Restaurant" in Japanese, and it is said レ(re) ス(su) ト(to) ラ(ra) ン(n).
Next we went to Abukuma Cave . This was a big limestone cave that had festive lights in some parts of the cave. Something that surprised me coming here was that you were allowed to touch everything.
The tour also featured racks of wine that were grown with Fukushima grapes and were being aged in the cave.
Finally we did some stencil assisted drawings (ラーソン is a way to write my family name using Katakana, one of the Japanese forms of writing) before we arrived at a small inn to spend the night.
We slept on futons at the end of the day.
