Another park that was new to us here in the great kingdom that Walt, Mickey and Michael Eisner built was "Disney/MGM Studios", built to compete head-to-head with "Universal Studios", which was just down the road.

I have only one picture to show you.  As I mentioned (for those of you who are regular readers), our wondrous digital camera is on the fritz.  The image below is decidedly fritzed, but I liked the effect enough to keep the picture, and even publish it here.  It was take by Joya, and shows the rest of the Thomas family as we walk along the street at MGM Studios, on a street made to look like 1920's Art Deco.  Somehow, people who are ghostly and left colorless as the color melts from their bodies seemed a bizarre commentary about the whole Disney experience.  Perhaps Walt's ghost is haunting my camera, and I need an exorcist.

We also took a backstage tour of a working live animation studio that was busy wrapping up a new Disney feature length cartoon called "Atlantis".  We learned it takes 24 frames per second to do Disney-style animation.  That works out to about 1 million frames for a movie, each frame drawn by hand by teams of animators.  We got to ask questions of a "rough animator", and learned how a cell of animation was assembled and colored.  Really interesting.

That night's dinner reservations were in Japan, at the Teppan restaurant there.  We sat and watched as the chef prepared our vegetable saut� right in front of us, on our table's griddle.  The food was excellent, and the presentation lively.  Japan was Jordan's favorite. We saw amazing Taiko drumming and she was especially pleased that the teppan chef was thoughtful enough to cook all the veggies first, before cooking any meat.  Doug drank a fair amount of sake and the edeman (soy beans) were delicious. We were nearly the last ones out of the park. There were two wheel chairs left in the empty parking lot, so the girls experimented with driving them.  They always wanted to do that. All in all, another good day.