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On Sunday we had a long bath in the morning in the onsen, ate some sashimi then went to the cinema to see the follow up to Spirited Away called Howl`s Moving Castle animated by Hayao Miyazaki. It`s about a large castle that moves and owned by a magician called Howl and a 19 year old girl in love with Howl who is cursed by an evil witch and becomes an old lady. It was all in Japanese although I understood the general plot I needed some of the extra bits explained to me but I can highly recommend it when it comes to your part of the world. The house reminds me of a Monty Python animation.

After that we went to a museum to see some excellent medieval Japanese paintings like this one below. See more at Kuboso Memorial Museum of Arts, Izumi. I also found that there were a couple of paintings by Renoir, Picasso and Monet which surprised me for a museum in a suburb of Osaka. We got there just twenty minutes before the place closed so there was only time to give the European paintings a quick glance before being practically pushed out of the museum.

In the evening we went to a sumo themed hot pot restaurant. In there you have a large pot with boiling water filled with tofu, bean sprouts, meat, fish and vegetables. I found out that sumo wrestlers eat only once a day and they eat massive portions of this to bulk up so it`s very healthy. Incidentally the recent tournament in Fukuoka has just finished with this hefty Monglian man winning it. He also thus attained the highest rank in sumo possible of yokozuna by winning 13 out of 15 bouts over the last two weeks. With the several afternoons and days off I have had over the last two weeks I have caught much of the action and really enjoyed it. There is an April tournament in Osaka and I really want to go and see it one day. One piece of advice though. Don`t make him angry.