Japan Day 5: Mazda and Itsukushima Shrine

   I was a little surprised at how interesting I found the Mazda visit to be. I'm not a "car-person" and I've visited car factories in the past and once you've seen one you've basically seen them all. Seeing the old cars was interesting, though I would have preferred if the allotted time had been a bit shorter.

The green color and plaid seat combination is... interesting

    I think I would've enjoyed it more if the students from the other school hadn't been there making whispered culturally insensitive remarks and ignoring the "do not touch" signs.

   After the museum part we had a brief chance to view part of the factory from a platform before going back for a video.

   I think the most interesting thing about Mazda was that they had their own little city complete with a giant bridge and a technical school, unfortunately we weren't allowed to take pictures of that part.
  
 After that we went to Itsukushima Shrine, aka the thing I'd been looking forward to most. We had to take a train and then a ferry to get there.

You could see the gate from pretty far away

    I wasn't disappointed at all. It was lovely and I took so many pictures that they had to have their own folder on my computer. The current gate may be the eighth one and the shrine may have had a lot of work done but that doesn't take away from the sense of history of the place. I would love to see it at high tide.

A small shrine in town

    The deer were fascinating in the way that they would just approach you and I saw a restaurant throw some vegetable scraps out to them. I could have happily spent a whole day on the island. If I ever go back I'll have to visit the aquarium as well since a classmate went and took some beautiful pictures.