Oideyasu! Please take off your shoes.
He calls Yoshiko "Mama" but I am called ね〜.
I'm getting over a nasty cold now, so I hope to be getting more Kyoto pictures in the near future.
A love tester (left) misses the mark at Jishu Shrine. A petitioner must walk with eyes closed from one sacred stone to another (about 15 m) to receive good luck in affairs of the heart.
Gregory turned the big ONE today (Feb. 20), and to celebrate he grabbed his new walker and strutted back and forth grinning like he had been just waiting for the chance. Then, he put the walker aside and walked three full unsupported steps without it, the first I had seen him do.
He is our sun and our moon; what a treasure it has been to share this year with him, watching him grow and learn every day. Look how much he's grown! (Link goes to "It's a Boy!" post of one year ago)
I was looking at the Kyoto City website last week and came across an item of interest, a free mobile phone-based Kyoto tourism thingy. Here is the site. Hopefully it works better than the strange map they put on the site. (If I could take the Eizan from Takaragaike to Kuramaguchi, that would be lovely).
Just down the street from my house, across the little Takano River bridge, is Takaragaike Park. A short walk across the park is the Kyoto International Conference Hall, where the Kyoto Protocol to slow the pumping of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere was worked out 8 years ago.
Just minutes ago a ceremony to mark the treaty's implementation today was concluded at KICH, featuring a keynote speech by Nobel Peace Prize-winning environmentalist Wangari Maathai of Kenya. I applied for a press pass to get pictures of the event, but I was not credentialed, and anyway I am laid up with a nasty cold. Here's a photo from the Kyoto Shinbun If you can read kana you can run the URL through Rikai.com and mouse over the text for help, but basically her message is that grass roots effort is the key to anything.
Fushimi Inari Taisha Shrine. Maybe we could wrap it in pink plastic or crimson velour or something, drum up a little more tourism, don'tcha think? Also noted by Robert Brady.
The Eizan Dentetsu train ("Eiden" for short) that goes to my neighborhood is only one or two cars long, and every train is a local. Only last year did they install card and ticket readers and begin accepting the Surutto Kansai card. Otherwise, the train still operates like a bus: You pull a paper ticket out of the machine when you enter, which has a number for your starting station printed on it. When you get off, you look up at the lighted fare board and pay the driver (he gets up out of his seat at every stop to man the fare box) according to your destination, dropping the fare and ticket into the till. At the terminal stations Demachiyanagi (close to downtown) and Kurama (in the mountains) you pay at the wickets rather than as you leave the train. The 10 minute ride from my station (really just a platform, there is no building) to Demachiyanagi costs ¥260.
Kyoto frosty desktop background
Click for 1280 X 960px background image.
With the formal assent of Russia last November, the tipping point of agreement was reached, and the Kyoto Protocol on the environment will take effect February 16 with a ceremony at Kyoto International Conference Hall, the site where the Third Congress of Parties (COP3) forged the pact in 1997.
Under the agreement, industrialised countries will have a deadline of 2012 to cut their collective emissions of six key greenhouse gases to 5.2% below the 1990 level.
Environmentalist Wangari Maathai of Kenya, the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, will be among the guest speakers for the event, and General Secretary Kofi Annan will participate by satellite.
Holiday fun with Greg. Wasn't scary at all to him; despite my evil gestures and monster sounds, he laughed at the masks.
Not a national holiday, but a Japanese holiday on Feb. 3 or 4 to mark the start of spring according to Chinese lunar calendar tradition. People, especially parents with young kids, scatter roasted soybeans (mame-maki) in the house, aiming some at Daddy in his demon (oni) mask, shouting Oni wa soto!! *fuku wa uchi!!, or "Demon out! Good luck in!!" Shrines and temples have kid-oriented oni hijinks shows, and also dramatic burning of wish sticks and reading of lucky omen manuscripts by shinto priests.
For the full effect, you should pick up and eat the number of beans corresponding to your age; also, people whose Chinese zodiac animal (2005: rooster) rolls around again (every 12 years) are in for a full year of good luck.
There is also the slightly dubious custom, promoted by Osaka seaweed merchants, that your should eat a whole "futomaki" sushi roll on Setsubun in silence while facing that year's lucky "ehoh" direction, which this year has been determined by the lucky seaweed wholesaler gods to be west-southwest.
It's really cold here, which to me means a few degrees below freezing. I mostly hibernate in winter and don't really know what it's like to be colder than that, except that on each of the three times I went skiing, I somehow got snow inside my clothes, leading to a very unpleasant slushy cold followed by numbness. The memory of this feeling is what has kept from ever trying snowboarding, which is something I'd like to try.
We got about 30cm snow overnight. Downtown it mostly melted, as you can see in this photograph; up here, however, snow is much more persistent, and a snowman (yuki-daruma) can survive for about five days.
