Oideyasu! Please take off your shoes.
Gregory Taishi Ferry, Age 2
Party at Grandma's house with Thomas the Tank Engine decorations, fun new toys and chocolatecake with banana sauce. New words are coming out of his mouth too fast to count these days, but one development of note is the way he bows deeply, almost touching his forehead to the ground and says "konnichiwa" and "konbanwa."
Monorail, desolate shopping center "whimsically" shaped like UFO, cluster after cluster of 25-story monolitic apartment buildings. Rokko island is the ultimate dystopia. Every time I get off the monorail at Island Center station, I see this view and the first thing that pops into my mind is, "Run, Logan!" Every time.
Now is the time, let's do it this month. Reply here, and I'm going to send out emails tonight asking for your choice of day. Osakans, lapsed bloggers, groupies and entourages welcome.
View this clip on Vimeo
Birdwatching on the Shirakawa in Gion, Kyoto. This is the actual section of the Shirakawa in the book and movie "Memoirs of a Geisha." The teahouses and restaurants backing the stream are the ones in Tominaga-cho. The bird is a common "aosagi" or blue heron. The last few scenes (starting from the lantern in dark street) are not Gion but the district called Miyagawa-cho and Kamo River.
You can now zoom down to within one step of maximum all over Kyoto city. You can see some of the stone groupings in the famous dry landscape garden at Ryoanji (under big brown roof at center; if you could zoom down one more level you could see if Richard Gere was there), and the shadow of the Kogetsudai moon reflecting sand cone in the garden at Ginkakuji (the little black point in lwer arm of the sand garden, and the roof of the Silver Pavilion is the pyramid in the trees just below to the left of the garden);
There's also Kinkakuji, and Kiyomizu doesn't look like much from space, does it?
Cheap accommodations near Kyoto Station. ¥4,400 per person (¥5,000 with private bath and toilet) and ¥400 discount for online reservations.
