Pineapple Park

Today we went to the Pineapple Park. In the three years we've been here, I've wanted to go, but we just never got around to it. It seems to get a lot of hype, for something that is really just kind of ho hum. I think I had more fun with the decorations than the park itself. It started with us buying tickets to go on the "tour".

You get to ride around in these pineapple carts. They set up a translator, and you drive for about 5-8 minutes through the park and they explain things to you. Things like "Do you know where the word pineapple comes from? It comes from pine, like pine cone, and apple." Not kidding, that's what it said. It also said "there are about 200 varieties of pineapple, edible varieties, are about 200." Yeah, we had a blast listening to the tour!

Now maybe I'm stupid, but for some reason I always thought pineapples grew on trees. (maybe because of the whole pine cone/apple thing..... ) Anyway, I did not know they grew like this. Pretty cool stuff. These were so tiny and cute. What is it about miniaturized things being cute? I've never understood it, but I'm a believer in it. Hmmmm

After the tour of the pineapple area all of a sudden you get to walk through a few rooms filled with..... shells. I"m not sure where the shells fit in with pineapples, but it was interesting. These were just regular old shells, dyed different colors. Rylissa got so excited about them, and she said "You've got to be kidding me!" Note to self, you say that way too much.

I have no clue what these are, are they shells or bones? I don't know, everything was in Japanese, but they were really cool looking.

After all the fun in the shell room, you get to do the tasting. They produce a lot of Pineapple wine, and the first tasters section was filled with wine. We skipped over that and went straight to the pineapple juices. I tried three, and only liked one. The others were very tart, and sour. They had a HUGE assortment of cakes, pineapple flavored cookies, and chocolates. What's funny is all the cakes looked the same, but in reality I only though one tasted any good at all. The kids (except the non-eater Corben) enjoyed trying the different sweets. We even got to eat fresh pineapple, that was yummy. Then on our way out, they were letting you taste the filling for some Pineapple cream puffs, and Sweet potato cream puffs. I'm not a fan of cream puffs, just never liked them. I tasted the pineapple filling and it was soooooo good. The potato one was okay. I ended up buying one of the cream puffs to try.

Now just imagine, sweetened pastry dough, with real whipping cream, and fresh chunks of pineapple in it. Mmmmmm. It was delicious.

Even after trying all the different sweets, we were still hungry, so off we went to McDonalds, where everyone found something they wanted to eat, even me, because I don't like the Japanese McDonalds. (they put this peppery mayonnaise on EVERYTHING and it's so strong, I can't stand it!)