Jeff and I went to Japan Fest yesterday with my sister, Danielle and her two children, Astrid and Lula.

Here’s Lula with a flower she picked for me.

And Astrid practicing his “smile for the camera” face.

Japan Fest was held at the Gwinnett Convention Center…

We were all starving for lunch when we got in so it was straight to the food court for us!

Here’s Danielle with a chicken and rice bowl…

Jeff and I shared some sushi samplings including one of our favorites, inari, which is fried bean curd skin wrapped around rice.

It was ok.  We got Danielle to try one of each and she was not happy, she was a trooper and didn’t spit anything out though!

Astrid liked this White Peach flavored drink…

Jeff and I had tea, of course.  Ito En makes the best bottled teas, no sugar added which is how we like it.

We split this Sapporo between the three adults (of course.)

The kids were really antsy during lunch so we knew we had to go do something fun quickly or there was going to be a meltdown.

We took them to the children’s area for some arts and crafts projects. Astrid made a fish kite with the help of his uncle Jeff…

Lula was deeply immersed in drawing polka dots on her shoe-shaped box…

Here’s the finished product with Danielle’s addition of a kitty on the front.  So stylish!

We met another kitty on the way to our next stop.  It’s Maneki Neko!  The kids posed with their craft projects, which they were very proud of.

We watched a little sumo…

And looked at the beautiful embroidery on these kimonos…

We watched some traditional dances.  Lula kept saying to Danielle, “They’re so beautiful, mommy!”  She’s in her “princess” phase right now and I think that she was convinced that the dancers were princesses in their “gowns.”

After that we walked through an ikebana exibit…

Then did some balloon fishing.  Astrid caught a big one!

We shopped but didn’t find anything to take home…I kinda wanted a Totoro hat though!

There was more to see but we were pretty beat so we checked out some bonsai then headed home.

Astrid could not wait, as soon as we got in the door he was begging Jeff to let him play Mario.  That kid is definitely a gamer at heart.

All in all a great day.  There were some other things we wanted to see like language seminars and sake-brewing classes, but the kids would have been really bored with that stuff.  And we missed a lot of the really entertaining things like archery and swordsmanship demonstrations for no good reason other than that what we wanted to see always seemed to be on the other side of the convention center and we wouldn’t make it in time.

The day was really about spending time with our lovely niece and nephew, though, which is exactly what we did.  We always look forward to seeing those two, and my wonderful sister.   Thanks for a great day guys!