The world's largest ferris wheel...

...is in Fukushima! With a morning off we trekked (by train, then by subway) off to Osaka harbor, which has an aquatic museum, a human rights a museum, a pottery museum, and the Tempozan Giant Wheel. At 112.5 meters high, it indeed ranks #1 in the world. Here it is from the square that has the aquatic museum, et al.



A complete revolution takes approx. 15 minutes. The car was incredibly smooth and balanced. Ruben is slightly acrophphobic, so he was a little queasy on the way up, but once we hit the top, he was fine. There was plenty of room for the three of us (Cheryl, Ruben, and me).

Here's the aquatic museum, which, unfortunately, we didn't have time to explore.



For whatever bizarre reason, not everybody wanted to go on the wheel - we caught a few of them waving to us as we started up.



Turns out that the wheel broke down after we got off, and they had a hard time getting it going again. Fortunately, I hadn't gone too far off, so I was able to leap into action. Here I am giving the wheel the final push to start it up again. They thanked me profusely and promised to name their next children after me. "It's all in a day's work," I demured.



My work there was done.

---Jason