Oideyasu! Please take off your shoes.
Greg checks out the hookah water pipe (behind brazier) at Turkish restaurant Saray on the south side of Kyoto Royal Hotel in Sanjo. Luckily, no one was smoking while we were there. We went there for the first time this weekend and ordered the course dinner to celebrate Yoshiko's birthday. Kebabs, hummus, various yogurt things, Turkish beers, chai and my first time to have coffee made in the Turkish way. Greg tried lots of new things, but he likes everything, EVERYTHING! Then he began careening around the restaurant in his unofficial role of greeter and mayhem master.
Hiroko of Zappa, an Indonesian restaurant/pub off Kiyamachi between Shijo and Sanjo. I don't know the names of Indonesian dishes, but it all tastes good and it's got peanut sauce and chili sauce and tastes great with beer, so you should go there. From Kiyamachi-Shijo, go north past the old school, turn left on the street that borders the school and left again at the alleyway next to the red window. It's down the alley about 30 m.
Getting Lost and Finding Yourself in the Ancient Capital. (QT 4.2 MB) Anyone interested in a multimedia guidebook and exploration-type DVD? I've been gathering 3CCD DV footage on a steady tripod for about a year (not the shaky handheld clips I've published here) and sharpening editing skillz. Any comments welcome.
Try this version (somewhat lower quality Sorensen 3 codec) only if you can't see anything with above link.
A brief Quicktime movie (7 MB) of scenes from the Yoiyama night of Gion Matsuri (Festival) 2005. Yoiyama is the last of 3 nights of revelry before the parade on the morning of July 17.
An elderly puppeteer does a fascinating puppet dance routine with folk music every year on Shijo bridge.
A man and his okonomiyaki; street revelers; the king of bling; girls in yukata at McDonald's; college students continue the tradition of riding down the Kamogawa spillways on inflatable orcas. Why is it always orcas?
Kodomo Miraikan (Subway Marutamachi exit 5) is a fun place for kids to play and has child health and care programs for parents.
in a festival display. I can't remember how many hundreds of years old it is (the caretaker told me), but it was a lot.
Baby ducklings have hatched in the little riparian environment under the towers.
It's been raining for days on end. We went to a CPR and child safety class at the Red Cross Hospital. I was certified in CPR in high school, but that was a long time ago, and didn't focus on kids, so it was a valuable class for both of us. Also, they have a model house, a kind of house of child safety horrors, with all the childproofing "do's" and "don'ts" marked out. Too many "dont's" at our house, so we've already set to work on fixing some of them, but I don't know how we can do them all. The number one cause of death in kids after congenital medical problems is accidents at home, and among those the bathtub is the primary danger zone: don't leave your bathtub filled overnight, don't let your kid have access to the bathroom, etc. An NHK TV crew happened to be there on the day of our class, and we were briefly on the evening news, but just briefly.
